There are classic Sci-Fi writers that everyone with a relevant interest knows. If I do a Google search for “pantheon of classic sci-fi writers,” you’ll see many of them including Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Ann McCaffrey, and Kurt Vonnegut. I agree with all of those, but there are a few that are missing in my humble opinion. Among those few is Clifford D. Simak. He hasn’t had movies or shows made of his work like most of those on this list (Niven and McCaffrey haven’t had any splashes on screens big or small yet, but their most popular works have been conversation for shows in the last decade or two). You will likely not find Simak on too many bookstore shelves. Whether you are a Sci-Fi writer (aspiring or otherwise) or just a Sci-Fi fan, I’d at least take a look at Simak.

If you are unfamiliar with Simak, I don’t blame you. His name is not as synonymous with Sci-Fi as many of those previously mentioned, and knowledge of his works and impact may be limited even for those that are avid sci-fi readers. There was no shortage of Sci-Fi books in Simak’s era and it was even harder for a Sci-Fi writer to break through and become a hit. It was a world where fame and popularity mostly happened by word of mouth, and I do mean literal word of mouth. If you need an intro then you should read Way Station and City by Simak. These books are fantastic, filled with possibilities, explore interesting plots, and are never short on ideas.

Let me talk about my most recent read from Simak, Shakespeare’s Planet. This book didn’t see a lot of fanfare around it, and though many of Simak’s works you can find still in print, Shakespeare’s Planet is only available on Kindle and Audible  unless you go to the used market. I got lucky and found a first-edition hardcover somewhere. The dust jacket is beat up, and the pages are aged, but it’s otherwise a solid copy. I took my time with this book. Mostly because I often don’t have much time for physical books unless I really push aside other things in my life.

If you do want to read this book, I suggest skipping the rest of this blog. I am going to spoil concepts in the book and it will be in service of a point, but I will not spoil how the plot unfolds with those concepts or even how those concepts fit together into a story. Last warning for those spoilers.

In Shakespeare’s Planet, you will find the following concepts: wormhole travel to different worlds using a dialing device built by an ancient race of unknown aliens (Stargate anyone?), an exploration of near speed of light travel and how its similarities to time-travel, a sentient puddle that maintains a continuous consciousness across vast interstellar distances, a ship that is controlled by three downloaded human minds that have been living together for centuries, time dilation fields that can freeze time for a section of space (again, Stargate?), telepathy, and exploring the origin of myths and legends for the human race centuries in the future.

Did I mention that the book is a cool 178 pages?

That’s the genius and even the audacity of Simak. He routinely takes a dozen ideas and concepts that could each be the basis for a novel, and crowds them together in one tight space to see what happens. Does it always work perfectly? No, I’ll admit that, but reading one of his books is often like mainlining creativity from its source.

Though Simak found a place in his time living off his writing, I have to wonder, would he have found a foothold now, or would he have been washed away like so many other writers. I tend to believe that good writing always rises to the top, but what’s good today may not be perceived as good tomorrow. Maybe a topic for another blog entirely.

Quote of the Moment

“He took a step forward for a closer look and was stopped—stopped by nothing. There was nothing there to stop him; it was as if he had run into a wall he could neither see nor feel. No, not a wall, he thought. His mind scurried frantically for some sort of simile that would express what had happened. But there seemed to be no simile, for the thing that stopped him was a nothingness. He lifted his free hand and felt in front of him. The hand found nothing, but the hand was stopped. No physical sensation, nothing he could feel or sense. It was, he thought, as if he had encountered the end of reality, as if he’d reached a place where there was nowhere to go. As if someone had drawn a line and said the world ends here, there is nothing that extends beyond this line. No matter what you see, or think you see, there is nothing there. But if that were true, he thought, there was something very wrong, for he could see beyond reality.”

– Clifford D. Simak, Shakespeare’s Planet

Current Reads:

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

In this world, it’s too easy to seek approval for everything. You install a dishwasher, buy a car, get a promotion, make a cake, or heaven forbid write a first draft of a novel, and there’s a part of you that wants the world to split wide open and grant appreciation for your accomplishment.

The world as a whole never does this, so don’t expect it and don’t work toward it.

If you are working for appreciation outside of your own, then it might be time to stop. Or at least, take a break and reassess. Appreciation sought rarely matches appreciation obtained, often even from those you love and care about. It’s not their fault. It’s a product of how the human mind works. Perhaps it’s a primal drive. Some promised reward to push us forward even though it will never trigger the chemicals in your brain the way we hope.

You have to work for your own satisfaction. You have to reinvent accomplishment. Why does beating a level in a video game provide more of a sense of accomplishment sometimes than writing a page? On the surface it shouldn’t but under the surface, one of those experiences has been designed to give you an artificial sense of accomplishment. Sadly, writing a page hasn’t, and I don’t think there is any gamification app or metric that is good for the writer and provides that designed sense of accomplishment.

I’ve written on this a bit before. The trap of being motivated by word count and WPM encourages bad writing fast and not good writing done right. Those metrics have their places but don’t make them your fuel.

That’s my challenge to anyone reading, build a sense of accomplishment in your writing or in whatever you do. How to do this will be different for each person, each craft, and perhaps even each project, but once it is done, any approval you get will be merely a bonus instead of the goal.

Quote of the Moment:
 

“Our brains are so terrifically oversized, we have to keep inventing things to want, to buy.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

There is a lot of power in a blank page. Can it be intimidating? Of course, but to me, writing a scene smack in the middle of something I already wrote is way more frightening. Ensuring that one thing flows into another and everything makes sense in the big picture is terrifying. On a blank page, you have none of that. Any mistake you make doesn’t matter. Your universe doesn’t exist at this point, beyond a few simple neurons firing in your mind, if it’s even that far along.

A blank page, in this sense, is perfect. The only thing you have left to do is screw it up with a beautiful story set in any universe you can imagine. You owe a lot to that blank page or that mostly empty computer screen with its blinking cursor.

A blank page has another beautiful quality. They are endless. You can always find another blank page to extend your story further or to start over again. Don’t like the story you began? Put it away, pull another blank sheet or document file out of the ether, and start over.

I find myself doing this even on big stories. No, especially on big stories. If I need to write a scene that I hadn’t planned for, it can be scary to just start writing in the middle of something, worry about all that pesky connective tissue, and still write something that’s worthwhile reading. Those scenes are always tricky. Usually, they exist—at least in my writing—because I have some detail I want to include or some relationship that I haven’t justified. By definition, this means that the scene isn’t going to fit perfectly, no matter what. It’s like building a tricycle, and realizing you really need a fourth wheel. There isn’t going to be a clean way to do it

To continue the simile, sometimes it helps to build the new wheel assembly and just stick it on. You’ll have to rebuild and rework the rest of the trike with that new wheel assembly in mind. A lot will have to change, including the assembly itself, but you have the benefit of working on a page and not in the real world. If you are stuck on a scene, try pulling a blank page out of your quiver, and just try to write a good scene that does what you want it to. To hell with all those  pages with words already littered across them. Just focus on the blank space and see what you can do. You can always massage out all the oddities on your next draft.

Screw up some perfectly blank pages, and see what you can create.

Quote of the Moment:

“You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”

― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

I have something in my life I like to call an accomplishment trap, and they are best to be avoided. Maybe you have these in your life as well. You might call them something else, or perhaps you haven’t noticed them yet, and like someone still trapped in the Matrix, you just get this feeling that something is wrong when you are working toward your goals. That thing could be an accomplishment trap.
These pesky traps can show up anywhere in your life. I liken it to running a marathon. If you set out to run a marathon, what is your goal? For most people, it will be to finish with an added bonus goal of finishing under a certain time. You might track that by mile markers, or even by landmarks, it doesn’t matter. Each of those is not an accomplishment trap. Let’s add in a smartwatch—common equipment for a runner to have. You want to put that information to work, so maybe you track your heart rate too. In light of that, you try to get your heart rate to hit a certain number in the first mile. The human mind hungers for goals. We want that sense of accomplishment. It’s one of the reasons why video games are so good at holding our attention. This is an accomplishment trap though. It is a mini-goal that is not in service of the bigger goal at hand. It could even work to the detriment of your overall goal. You could work so hard to get that heart rate up in the first mile, that you tire prematurely and are unable to finish or get a time that you are happy with.
The same thing happens in writing. I want to write a bio for each character. I want to write 1,000 words at a writing meet-up. I want to average an 80 WPM this writing session. At the end of the day, with goals like these, you end up with several bios that are never useful or become outdated as your characters change, you have 1,000 words that were written while distracted half of which end up needing to be scrapped, and the words that come out at an 80 wpm clip might as well have been holes you were punching in your pages and in your plot.
Of course, what ultimately matters here is your overall goal which could be different from person to person or project to project. After all, not all people who enter a marathon care if they complete the race, that might just be a bonus. Maybe you don’t care if you finish your novel either. Maybe you just want to experiment with writing and spending dozens of hours writing scenes that would never go in your novel if you finished it, is not a wasted effort or an accomplishment trap. People come into writing with many goals. Maybe you want to meet people, maybe you want to understand more of what goes into making the novels you love, or maybe you are that rare bird that just wants to have fun.
Whenever you find yourself chasing some mini-goal, ensure it’s in service of your larger goal and not a pesky accomplishment trap.

Quote of the Moment:

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Can I say something quickly about brevity? Of course I can, this is my blog last I checked. When I first started writing on here again in a blogging capacity, I kept it short. As you can see that didn’t last long. Not that a 1,000-word blog is really all that long, but 1,000 words of semi-intelligent writing, edited, and published, does represent a fair bit of time spent on my part from time that I already don’t have a great deal of. All that is to say that I want to try staying brief on here when I can.

However, on the subject of brevity, I do have an issue with it in all of my writing. It’s not so much spending too much time painting a picture. I spend too much time trying to connect everything. I spend too much time writing the uninteresting and unnecessary stuff, then I try to make it interesting and necessary instead of cutting it, only to eventually cut it later anyway.

If my main character Is sitting in a bar and from a conversation decides to go to the library, I want to type my way through everything. The exit of the bar, the street, the way to get there, what it looks like on arrival, and every minute detail along the way. Sometimes, I let this happen, knowing full well I am writing stuff that will ultimately be cut just in case it helps me see things differently or uncovers some new detail about location that I had not considered or the story goes in a whole new direction. I will admit though, that sometimes I just need to push through., skip the gristle, and get to the meat.

Is it the most efficient way to write? Not at all, but often my brain works in the written word, and though most of my good ideas start in the mind, writing things through is often how I find solutions to problems. In programming terms, it’s a process akin to rubber duck debugging. Often solving problems requires an outward expression of the idea. For programmers, that might be talking to a duck on your desk about a coding issue. For me, it’s writing and writing and writing until a solution emerges, then likely deleting 90% of what I wrote. The problem is knowing what words are part of the solution and what words aren’t.

The solution to writer’s block, at least for me, has always been more writing. It sounds dumb, but it also makes perfect sense.

Quote of the Moment:

“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do — not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less bullshit.”

—Stephen King, On Writing

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Entering a new fantasy world is daunting for any reader. Whenever you tell me there are ten+ books and the writer still has more to come, I pause. It’s easy to see why I have perhaps avoided Sanderson’s Cosmere for quite some time. These days I tend to read more fantasy than anything else, which might be a personal fad as my reading up until a few years ago was always oriented around Sci-Fi. Don’t get me wrong, I still read plenty of fantasy. A Song of Ice and Fire had a place in my heart before the show ever came out. The Lord of the Rings is a foundational work in both my heart and mind, and I still believe that the Kingkiller Chronicles represents some of the best modern speculative writing I have ever had the pleasure to read.

If you had tried to get me to read books in the Cosmere universe a few years ago, I would have been polite, but I don’t think I would have headed to the bookstore anytime soon. If you have looked at the books I’ve been reading you’ll notice a lot of Cosmere in there. Next week, I will likely add one more to the list as well. I’ve read just enough of the Cosmere that I want to talk about it, but not enough to be any sort of an expert. So if I misspeak when it comes to one of your favorite fantasy universes, please forgive me, and if the Cosmere is not in your pantheon of must-read fantasy yet, maybe the words of this Cosmere novice will help you.

In reflecting on my journey through the Cosmere thus far, it started in a way that I am not proud of. I got sucked up into the “Year of Sanderson” with his all too famous record-breaking Kickstarter (he just had another, this time on BackerKit if you haven’t been paying attention). There was suddenly so much attention on this author that I only really knew of as that guy who writes a billion fantasy novels and helped finish The Wheel of Time. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and taking some of the Internet’s always-trusted advice, I started with Mistborn. That trilogy hooked me hard with an interesting cast of characters, a magic system unlike any I had ever seen on paper, and a compelling world.

I Read:

• The Final Empire
• The Well of Ascension
• The Hero of Ages

With that trilogy down and some money spent on the Kickstarter (well-spent I might add, the secret novels were beautiful and worth the price of admission), I was ready to keep going. I loved the idea of a time jump in fantasy. It’s been done before, but jumping ahead to a time period like the 1920’s with many of the world’s religions having been built around the events that took place in the first trilogy wasn’t just cool, it was a window into how the Cosmere works. You can read any book or any series set in the Cosmere in any order you want so long as you respect any series it might belong to. The Wax and Wayne quartet (or at least the first three books) reads well even without the context of Mistborn, but with that added context you have a richer experience. It’s the same with something like the new Fallout show—which I am also loving but trying not to binge. My wife loves it too, but I think I’m having a different experience because the Fallout games had been such a big part of my life at one point in time.

I Read:

• Alloy of Law
• Shadows of Self
• Bands of Mourning

The observant among you have likely noticed that the last book of the quartet is missing from my list. Wax and Wayne wasn’t as strong as Mistborn for me, a sentiment I think I share with many, but that definitely wasn’t the reason I stopped. I wanted to dive into some of his other worlds. I started paying more attention to recommended reading orders. I wanted to know more about this Cosmere and not just this one sliver of it. I started my exploration with Tress of the Emerald Sea (going against reading orders in favor of reading this new book I just got), and then I read Elantris, The Hope of Elantris, and a few other non-Cosmere works like The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. Finally, there was The Way of Kings.

I Read:

• Tress of the Emerald Sea
• Elantris
• The Hope of Elantris
• The Way of Kings
• The Emperor’s Soul
• Warbreaker
• Shadows For Silence in the Forests of Hell
• Secret History

Feel free to criticize my reading order, but I will defend it. Not because I think it’s the right way, but because it’s a way, and that’s good enough. Unlike Discworld (which is a beautiful tangled mess in its own right) the Cosmere may all take place in the same universe, but many of these characters will never meet each other. Their decisions will have little bearing on each other. Their magics are different, their enemies are different, and their legends are different but very occasionally, they might share an acquaintance. Very occasionally, you will see something in one world that ties right into something from another. And very occasionally something in your mind will click into place, like a puzzle you didn’t even know you were working on. The more you look, the more you see the hidden gears that run the Cosmere and work toward making these worlds, these magic systems, and these characters. That’s why the Cosmere is beautiful. That’s why I am excited to dig into Words of Radiance next week. And that’s why I am taking my time in the Cosmere and I’m loving it.

Quote of the Moment:

“Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination. Repeat the ancient oath and give to men the shards they once bore. The Knights Radiant must stand again.”

—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

I’ve done a lot of talking about my personal writing journey, what kind of writer I am, and the goals that I tend to focus on, but I haven’t talked about the software I use very much at all. Software, for many, is a personal journey in and of itself. I know it was for me. It wasn’t that long ago that the sum of most writing took place on a typewriter and before that just pen and paper. Writing has always been a three-way marriage between creativity, language, and technology.

Whether we were using crude paints with our fingers against cave walls or slapping keys on a computer, the latest technology of the time has always had a key role to play in the writing process. In modern times, that role is invisible. We can look at a movie and tell what is and isn’t CGI—even when we can’t, there are experts who can—but you can’t pick a book off the shelf and know how it was written and what role technology played in its creation. The only way we know is if an author talks about it. So here I go, talking about it.

For most of my writing in the last decade, I have used Scrivener. If you have spent any time on the Internet as a writer, aspiring or otherwise, then you have heard of it. Let me be honest, it’s a flawed beast, but it might be the best one. It allows you to work out of hundreds of documents at a time and organize those documents in some meaningful fashion. It’s adaptable enough that you can use it in ways that it wasn’t intended for. I may go into specifics of my Scrivener setup at some point as well, but let’s skip that for now.

I have tried a lot of things. I have tried all the note-taking apps like OneNote, Google Keep, Evernote, etc. I have worked in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Note Pad. And I have tried at least a half-dozen others that were aimed at novel writers. Many of those novel word processors had great features, even features that I was interested in, but it was often a missing feature that I had grown accustomed to from Scrivener or a price tag that made me turn the other way. I am not a fan of paying a monthly subscription for a word processor.

The big downside here is that Scrivener is not web-based, has no cloud support, and generally gets funky if you try to swap between machines. Despite this, Scrivener is a stable platform even when you are messing with it in ways that they say you shouldn’t (using Google Drive to store project files and accessing from different machines). It’s something I have learned to live with, and in a pinch, I will use OneNote or Google Docs to hold my ideas until I can get them to Scrivener. I also use OneNote for blog writing mostly just so I can sketch stuff out on my phone and have it handy when I need it.

Within Scrivener, I have a bit of everything. I have short stories, concepts, ideas, etc. When it comes to a novel project, my process varies quite a bit from project to project, but this current fantasy monster I am working on has docs for most cities, all characters, all creatures, concepts, languages, cultures, history, and more. If there is some aspect of my world that I have to reference, then I ensure I can easily reference it.

I also love data. I may have mentioned it before, but English and writing was never my strong suit. Math and numbers were. Both writing and math have their mysteries and legends, and though numbers came easy, it was writing that always intrigued me.

Though I may be a writer, I’m still obsessed with data and numbers. That’s why I keep Google Sheets handy when I am writing. I used to use it to track a lot of stuff like daily word count, total project length by day, etc. Now I keep track of word count on the project and individual chapters along with a rough estimate on how far along each chapter or section is just to get any idea of where my draft is in terms of completion. I also use it to track what I am reading, what I want to be reading, and more.

For most of my projects, I never had a need for things like maps, but for my current project, it was growing to be too much to keep in my head and needed to be something more than what I could scrawl with my hand. I tried a few things and turned to Inkarnate. I won’t link it directly, but it is a pretty neat tool for map generation. Saving can be slow and fickle and it is a monthly fee service (just $5 if memory serves) so I don’t want to just recommend it. You can download your map even if you are in non-payment, you just can’t edit. If you are in a similar pinch, look for some options, and if you exhaust those, Inkarnate may not be a bad way to go. If you have more map-making needs than just a novel project or two, then perhaps you will get your money’s worth.

I have dabbled with using more software. I’ve built my own custom word count/WPM JavaScript app. I’ve tried keeping some parts of my writing process in one spot and others in another, but I find I work better the fewer apps I need. Even with Inkarnate, once I update the map I download and keep a copy in Scrivener itself for reference.

By the way, it’s not all software. Often when it comes to a good proof on a first draft, I still prefer printing things out and working through it with a bright red pen and all the band handwriting that my fingertips can bring to bear, and for those random ideas in the middle of the night, nothing beats a little notebook on my nightstand and a pen at the ready.

My advice to you, if you feel like you don’t need something to be different. If you are writing everything just fine in Google Docs or whatever, don’t change. Don’t try something new. But if you feel like your software isn’t letting you organize your writing in the way that you want or that it impedes your process, then try stuff. Throw a search in Google, check out the deals at the end of a NaNoWriMo or just try Scrivener. There are so many options out there, I doubt everyone will find a perfect match, I never did, but you can get close.

Quote of the Moment:

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

Last week, I wrote about my process, and yet never mentioned word count. My relationship with word count has evolved greatly over just the last year, and it makes some amount of sense that I forgot to include it. My post last week was also getting a bit on the long side. I enjoy this blog but only so long as it doesn’t detract from writings of greater personal importance. This blog is a way to work through my writing and talk about it in a somewhat public space, but I don’t want it to be a crutch and I certainly don’t want it to be the only thing I write.

Let me start with where I think word-count-focused writing begins for a lot of people, with NaNoWriMo. If you are unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo it stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place every year in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in that period, which translates to roughly 1,667 words per day. Now don’t misunderstand some of the things I am about to say. I love NaNoWriMo. It’s a chance to buckle down, with a goal, and feel like you accomplished something at the end.

The challenge itself has some issues. The first is that a novel is not 50,000 words. Double that and you have something. The second is that most full-time writers often write more than 1,667 words in a day and yet they don’t come out with new novels every few months. NaNoWriMo is great, but it sets people up to fail. It promises to push them to the top of a mountain but leaves the writer merely sitting base camp. Closer to the summit? Sure. Something you should be proud of? Of course. But you still have so far to go, you might be burned out, and with the no-looking-back attitude of NaNoWriMo, you probably have a lot of bad writing left in your wake.

Last year, I wanted to do a big push. I wanted to take things seriously. I didn’t want NaNoWriMo to define my writing. To be fair, it never defined my writing, but I did use it as a motivational tool, and last year NaNoWriMo was to be the end of a year-long road instead of the beginning of something. I would test myself. Test my endurance. And chase word count every month, building toward that 1,667.

It worked. I did it. And I often wrote utter shit. Sometimes I wrote shit because when I had finally carved out the time in the day I just didn’t have the mind for it. I wrote in junk files often, began projects that I didn’t believe in or have strong concepts for, and ignored my main project far too much, in part, because I knew that adding a significant amount of words to it, would take too much time. There was just too much to figure out sometimes for writing this scene or that scene.

I’ve always chased word count. Watching the number go up, knowing that once it hit a certain threshold I could stop and give my fingers a rest. I would see how fast I could write. Impress myself with WPM and left a trail of typos as I went.

By the time NaNoWriMo came and was conquered, I experienced burnout. But it was an odd burnout. I managed to rewire my brain a bit. Writing became more of a need than a want, but that word count still loomed large.

I’m a data guy and someone who has often designed and built games as a hobby and who loves to use a good spreadsheet to make a decision. I was gamifying my writing and I knew it. Tracking every day, looking at the average, the remainder, and setting goals, and none of them were in the service of good writing, just writing.

It wasn’t until that December when I took a step back and had the slow realization that all this time, and we are talking about more than just a year, but years, I had been incentivizing the wrong thing.

When I began this year I already knew that I was not going to emphasize word count, but rather writing time. I’ve barely looked at word count this year, and when I have it wasn’t session count but just a piece of information. Is this chapter too long? What is my total project word count sitting at? How much backstory did I write for this thing?

I still get distracted and find myself on other projects, but sometimes you have to get an idea down so it stops infecting your mind. It also means I can do other writing-related things and not feel like I am wasting time. Last year, I kept trying to find ways to count proofing time towards my word count. I could count those words and just take a percentage right? What if I am rewriting a section but using some of it? Should I copy this sentence so that it counts double somehow? All sorts of shit like that would come up that I would try to justify so that I could make my writing better but still win at my game.

Now I just use the time and I can feel it in my bones whether the time was used well or not. I try to carve out time every day. I try to make that time matter in whatever way is most productive and I measure that productivity in my bones.

What’s more, I no longer feel like I have to find an excuse to write. I don’t have to tell my family that I didn’t hit my word count yet today and I need like 20 minutes. I can just tell them I am going to write. A good family, like mine, and hopefully like yours, understands.

I don’t know what I am going to do for NaNoWriMo this year, maybe I will return to word count. If I do, I think I’ll have to do it with something new. With some project that I have on deck for just such an occasion. Until then, I will remain yours, blissfully unaware of word count.

Quote of the Moment:

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
―Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

You don’t have to look far to find a writer talking about their writing process. For the most part, I don’t know that I have much use for it. Not to be contrarian, but I wanted to write a little bit about my own writing process… if you can call it a process. This is mostly for me.

There are, of course, numerous volumes on the subject. Most seem to be little more than cash grabs or exercises in vanity. A few do stand out as useful though and they stand out for a key reason. They admit, upfront, to not having the answers, to not providing a solution, and they remain humble in their craft. On Writing by Stephen King comes to mind. The point of this all is that if you are looking for a process, you can look outside all you want to get ideas and to experiment, but at the end of the day, you are going to have to look inward to make any progress. I know it’s scary. Outside always feels brighter. Outside there are paths and trails well defined and trodden, but they are not yours, and walking down one will never feel quite right. Before I talk about my process, I have to encourage any and all readers to walk their own path. That path may be similar to others and may have even started as someone else’s path, but it will have to become your own before your writing will become your own.

In many ways, a writer’s process is a window into how a writer’s mind works. There are some writers that outline mercilessly and follow a process that is almost formulaic, even if the writing itself isn’t formulaic. Brandon Sanderson comes to mind here. I may do an entire blog post on him, to be honest.

Stephen King often writes in a style that he refers to as uncovering fossils. He typically has the start of a story in mind, complete with elaborate backstories—some of which may never see the page—but then he just writes, letting the characters tell him where the story should go. To him, it’s almost as if the story is already written. He is just finding it.

My writing process is better characterized as a hot mess. Maybe that’s not entirely true. I try to stay highly organized, and I write everything. I never let anything stay in my head on its own for too long. These two concepts butt heads at times. It’s hard to stay organized when you have scraps of sentences, ideas, back story, and the lords of writing knows what else all in the service of one story. Scrivener has been invaluable with keeping a modicum of organization to that process, but it’s still hard.

I liken my process to a big energetic dog eating a dinner spread. I start by chomping at the big meaty chunks, barely paying attention to the flavor, stuck in the thrill of eating before moving on to the smaller hunks of meat, maybe a veggie or a potato. By the end, I am licking the bowl trying to remember those big hunks that I swallowed mere seconds ago.

Most of my stories start with a concept. Something I want to explore and a character or a few characters that I want to explore the concept through. That inevitably leads to a few big scenes that I want to get down. Maybe a few more come to mind that I get written too along with some supporting backstory that I jot down for future reference. At this point, with the big chunks done, I have something that is barely coherent, at least if you attempt to take it as a whole. Then it’s time to move on to the medium chunks. Turning those big scenes into chapters, maybe even building out a few chapters before and after.

The next part is the hardest. I have to get my tongue into all the nooks and crannies. This is where I am building all the connective tissue. Not to be too graphic with my metaphor, but at this point, I usually have to vomit up some of those big chunks, reassess, rip apart, and sometimes completely rewrite. Some writers would say that this step should wait until after you have a first draft. Maybe they are right but I find that it’s hard for me to let it go. I used to find this tedious and tiresome, but more and more I see it as a puzzle to be solved. I love puzzles.

Once I have a first draft I prescribe to the Stephen King school of thought, and I have since long before I knew about his processes. I put the story away, and try my hardest not to think about it. For short stories, I try to leave it be until I have nearly forgotten what it is even about. For a novel, this is pretty much impossible. My memory might be utter shit at times, but I am not easily going to forget something that occupied so much of my mind for so long. Even so, I want some distance and maybe a few short projects before I attempt to dive back into that world.

The first review is the most challenging for me, and I imagine for most. I keep notes on everything as I review. Any detail that I want to be sure is referenced properly later and I likely have a host of notes already from when I was licking at the scraps trying to piece the puzzle together. They could be simple things like give this moment more weight or be sure to remember he had a sword during this scene. Some of these notes are for me to reference later in the read-through, others I know I am making for my next draft cycle, though I try to lean on the next draft cycle as little as possible.

When editing, I am treating my story like a patient and I am the doctor. I might have some idea what is wrong, but this process is going to work better for me and my patient if I leave my assumptions at the door and just treat the damn patient.

Writing, at least for me, is starting with nothing, and then pulling something out of the ether. This something is going to be chaotic, it will not make sense, and at times it might even seem insignificant. It’s my job—if you can call it that—to organize this chaos to make something meaningful. It is also the writer’s job to realize when the project should be aborted, sometimes temporarily until more of the ether chooses to speak life into the project, or perhaps forever.

In business and life we are often asked if the ends justify the means. Is the time that goes into it more valuable than what was created? In writing, sometimes you know when to cut your losses, but the truth is, if the means are fulfilling, then the ends are just a byproduct. It’s been a long, perhaps even unnecessarily long, road to get here, but I can finally admit that the means are fulfilling. Though I have high hopes for the ends, they are just a byproduct.

Quote of the Moment:

“Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

As I look through this site all I see are zombies. Words, ideas, projects all shambling around pretending to be stories. To be a good writer—as with anything—first, you have to be bad. Seeing the bad in your own writing, especially the old stuff, shows growth. When I wrote a lot of this stuff I felt that it was good. I must have anyway, right? But the writer that wrote that is gone and I’m here now. If we wake up every day a different person then hopefully I’m at least a better person and a better writer most days.

It does add particular difficulty to my longer writing projects though. When I write something big I rarely write in a sensible way. I write the scenes that have my attention. Scenes that are important but lack the all-important connective tissue. Coming back to the scene a year later when much of the story has been built up around it with world-building creating “the mountains in the distance” not to mention my growth as a writer and it’s like entering the uncanny valley. Perhaps it’s worse. I’m not just in the valley taking a stroll, I have to figure out everything that’s making it uncanny and fix it.

That’s fine though, none of those projects are published anywhere. My website is a different story, no pun intended. It’s published. It’s live, available to all, and I have the power to take it all down. Not going to lie, part of me wants to. A fresh start. It’s still my right. But I don’t think I will. We climb mountains for many reasons, we want to say we did it, we want to challenge ourselves, and we also want to look back to see how far we’ve come.

I still might take it down to make room for other mountains, but not today. Today, this site is just a monument and a reminder of who I was. Maybe it can also be a window for you and me as to who I am. More self-important bullshit. Just what I thought the world always needed.

Quote of the Moment:

 “I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?”
—Robert A. Heinlein, All You Zombies

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Have I stopped writing? If you ever visited here (more on the technicalities involved with that statement in a moment), then it may seem like that is the case. What has actually occurred is a lot of discouragement, battles with mental health, some life happening, and a ton of writing… Just writing that I didn’t want to put here or anywhere. I’ve ignored the public face of writing for so long that it’s a bit embarrassing that this infrequently updated site even exists. Which explains why I didn’t even notice my domain expiring and why we now have a hyphen in the URL. I think I like it though. It’s like a milestone, a reminder that I have rarely taken this site seriously.

Maybe I can fix that.

I’m not going to talk about what I want to do or even what I will do. Instead, I’ll reflect on what I have done and what I have been doing. At least this time around. Which, if you’ve looked at the posting history around here, this could be the only post for another long while. Time will tell, but I hope not.

I’ve been working on a big project. A fantasy novel that’s shaping up for about 200,000 words and I can say that with some confidence as I’m near that word count already. If you include all the background notes, failed chapters, and rewrites, I’m easily at a word count that is double that. I’ve proven that I have the discipline for this craft, to myself and my family if no one else, but I have not proven that I have the courage.  I’m still working on that part. I always tell my kids that everyone in this world needs to work on themselves no matter how young or old. I know I have some work to do, and writing about it in “public” as a very private person who borders on reclusiveness is my penance.

I’ll keep it brief for now, and maybe always. One of the many things I know about writing is that it is far easier to sit down and spend hours writing something that isn’t a thing you truly care about than spending 15 minutes doing so.

Quote of the Moment:

“I think all worlds are magic. We just get used to it.”
―Stephen King, Fairy Tale

Current Reads:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King
Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson

I will be brief out of necessity. I know I haven’t always gotten my additions to The Restless Dreamer live on time, but within a few days is good according to my track record. With NaNoWriMo quickly approaching, you may be getting worried. Don’t. All five Fridays in November are already accounted for and scheduled. The end of the first chapter is in sight, and the beginning of a new.

I know it can be hard to read The Restless Dreamer right now if you want to start from the beginning, and I do intend to fix that. After a chapter is published, I will give it a “final” edit, and publish here, free, as a whole to help reduce the clutter a fair bit. Though that treatment will not occur for Chapter 1 until December sometime so I may be getting ahead of myself.

Lastly, my NaNoWriMo will likely keep me busy in November. Probably too busy to post on the blog. My name on NaNoWriMo is TruthisFiction and my new project, my first Fantasy project for NaNoWriMo, is called Travella. I hope to see you out there grinding out the words.

Quote of the Moment:
“A man who loves money is a bastard. Someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is cool. You don’t hate him, but you’ve got to pity him.” – Stephen King, The Stand

Currently Reading/Listening to:
The Familiar: Honeysuckle & Pain by Mark Z. Danielewski
A Tapestry of Magics by Brian Daley
The Stand by Stephen King
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

Sorry for the silence again. Life happens. The blog will go on, and I have a fresh project to share with you all. It’s called Restless Dreamer and it will be an online published serialized novel. Okay, that’s a lot of words to describe a project, but let me put it in simpler albeit more verbose terms. Every week, I will publish 500 or-so words of what will be a novel. This will of course be entirely free and available. Since this is a living breathing project that will not be entirely written (or even outlined, gasp) ahead of time, I reserve the right to retcon, change entire passages or chapters, and even scrap the whole damn thing. I have ideas about where it is going, but we are going to discover the story together.

These fresh passages will pop up in the normal feeds and in the normal places, and they will all get the tag Restless Dreamer as opposed to the Standalone tag that most other projects here have. I may have to tweak feeds and stuff to get it to display in a nice readable fashion at some point as chronologically it will show up in reverse order, but I will burn or cross that bridge when I come to it. In my attempt to let my actions speak louder than the words I type on these little blog posts. I have already published the first passage today. I have also scheduled the next two for the next two weeks. Look forward to them every Friday evening, hopefully for a long time. Thank you for your patience, and I hope you will come along with me for this ride.

Quote of the Moment:
“We could build ourselves a heaven. But Why? We were Heaven already. Only in the very end did we try to build a S.O.U.L. That which would outlast V.E.M., outlast The Verse, outlast death. But it was impossible. Or we were too late. Though still the H.O.L.Y. tried. And built Hell instead.” – Mark Z. Danielewski, The Familiar: Honeysuckle & Pain

Currently Reading/Listening to:
The Familiar: Honeysuckle & Pain by Mark Z. Danielewski
A Tapestry of Magics  by Brian Daley
The Stand by Stephen King
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

I’ve been asleep at the wheel again around here, and I wish I could say that’s going to change, but that is not a promise I can easily keep. Instead, I vow to keep coming back, to stop talking about plans and what I can do better, and to simply do when, where, and how I can and report on my findings. Why list here what I have to do? I know what I have to do and chances are you don’t care. At the very least you don’t care when it’s not done but rather when it is.

I ramble in these posts sometimes. Okay, all the time, but that’s what my first stories were like and sometimes I still write like that. Sometimes I still write stories without an end or a story arc. A premise is the easy part, and I don’t even really have one of those for this post. Don’t forgive me. I love excuses, procrastination, and avoidance. These are my biggest curses, and I’m sure most can relate to that. Which makes it mostly uninteresting.

Here’s what I did accomplish. I finished proofing and tagging. I’ll write a post about tagging and what it will mean going forward later (more promises). I also updated my published works page to include “Words for Home.” I hope you enjoyed reading it over at the Bronzeville Bee. Full disclosure, my Dad gave me the premise for that story years ago. Though the premise has been thrown around in Sci-Fi a lot in one form or another, I hope you will agree that I provided an interesting take on it.

Oh, also I’d like to start including quotes from what I’m reading here from time to time. I said I would do instead of promise so here is my first, though in this case, it’s from something I recently finished. Enjoy!

Quote of the Moment:
“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.” – Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

Currently reading/listening to:
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Alan Hodges
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

Just a short post today to celebrate my latest published story. It’s a short piece called “Words for Home” and you can check it out in The Bronzeville Bee right here: “Words For Home” by Clint Monette. That’s all I got today.

Currently reading/listening to:
Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett
A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Alan Hodges
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

It’s been a little while since I’ve talked about what I’ve been reading. As you can see below, I have once again waded into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Universe with Interesting Times. Reading any of his Discworld novels has always been a breath of fresh air regardless of what I have been reading. He masterfully condenses events that could fill chapters into mere pages and manages to do so with prose that is often insightful, always witty, and intimidating. I say intimidating because it’s almost hard to believe that the man could write that well, that quickly, and still keep the cart firmly planted in the realm of humor. He puts on a clinic in voice that any author can appreciate if not be profoundly jealous of. I have avoided losing myself in his universe partly because I don’t like reading too much from one mind all at once, partly because his voice is so good it can muddle my own, and partly because I would one day like to be eighty, sitting on a beach with my wife, and still reading Discworld novels that I have never read before.

My reading list has had a small rash of fantasy which is atypical. I enjoy fantasy but some of the tropes can be tiresome. However, if you are looking for fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings then The Magician by Raymond E. Feist is worth a read. Despite a mad king, a thieves guild, and secret plots it still manages to be more hopeful than many of its contemporaries. I was lucky enough to snag a first edition but later editions broke this into two books: The Magician: Apprentice and The Magician: Master. If you are going to read one, you really should read the other too in my humble opinion.

The last book I want to talk about is that one that’s been on my list forever. Galaxy Outlaws is the perfect commute book, but with its Audible version coming in at just over 80 hours, it is set to last me for quite some time. It’s not one story but a whole mess of them all with the same entertaining characters. It’s sci-fi, it’s fantasy, it’s everything that you want from a ragtag band of lovable space outlaws… and a wizard. The story length of these missions is great too. The stories just move and it’s wonderful. I will likely talk more of it in the future, just wanted to do a little raving now.

Last and final note from the bramble of a blog, I’m not sure what I am going to do about the second short story this month. I’m exploring my options, but everything is out in the wind right now and my time is up. On the plus side, some good news should be on the horizon.

Currently reading/listening to:
Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett
A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

My goal was to do two stories a month, one on the second Friday and one on the last Friday. This Friday I was in a bit of a predicament. You see, all the stories I have prepared are currently being reviewed by outlets for potential publication. I had nothing to present to you fine folks. As a last resort, I decided to finally write an idea I’ve had for a while, and that’s how we have today’s story. It’s weird, short, difficult to write (for me), and I would likely not be able to find a place for it elsewhere anyway, so I’m publishing it here first without shopping it around. Enjoy!

Currently reading/listening to:
The Magician by Raymond E. Feist
A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak
A TIme to Kill by John Grisham
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

I’ve come to the point where I am not sure what to write in this blog space. I don’t want to force myself to write a blog post when there is no idea behind it, but that’s kind of what I am doing right now. I’m writing about the idea of not having an idea. I want this blog to be meaningful, and though it will never be as meaningful to me as my story writing, I still want it to mean something. This blog post is about that. Are you lost yet? I might be.

As a writer, I tend to have a lot of ideas for stories I want to write. Many of them mill about in my head for far too long as I struggle to come up with the right words or even enough time to get them down. It’s a process of attrition, and probably not a good one. Some ideas start with a character, an event, or even just a concept. It’s the concepts that are the worst for me. They feel wide with promise, but really they are just wide with premise.

To give you an example, here’s a short story that I might throw together sometime. I don’t really care about it that much because it came from a thought exercise, which is why I feel okay writing about it here before I’ve actually written it (if I actually write it). I started with two words, what if, and pushed forward with the first thought that came into my mind. That full thought was, what if worms were sentient?

Not a great premise to begin with, but this is where many of my seemingly great ideas get stuck. I need to have something happen. I could write pages of worms talking and exploring. Hell, I could dwell on dirt for at least 1,000 words, but if that’s all it is, then they might as well be human, and at that point, my premise evaporates.

I did get passed the premise on this one. In fact, I’m far enough along that I might actually put words to paper outside of this blog post, but we’ll see. Here was my thought process in a gorgeous bulleted list.

• What’s the setting. Where do worms live? Everywhere I suppose, but a graveyard would be an interesting starting point.
• Okay, maybe a graveyard would be like a kingdom to a worm.
• What about a fresh grave?
• Putting aside all the nasty chemicals in a freshly buried body, a corpse could be a big prize for an enterprising worm.
• That’s the story, a family of worms trying to be the first to get through a fresh coffin and claim the prize.
• But that’s not interesting enough on its own. What if the coffin was symbolic, buried empty for someone lost.
• Now we have a real story, with an obstacle and an interesting place to go with it.

This idea may end up in the junk drawer, and that’s fine, but every premise deserves at least one story concept to test its marrow. I think that’s all I got for now. Pretty long blog for one written without an idea. You’ll hear more from me soon… maybe.

Currently reading/listening to:
The Magician by Raymond E. Feist
A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak
Revival by Stephen King
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

My next story will go live tomorrow, which means I kept my promise to this often abused and forgotten website for an entire month. I still have to do some pruning around here though, so let’s call it a mostly kept promise. Honestly, my pruning work was put on the back burner for other work behind the scenes. I have a lot more stories in the mill and an even bigger project idea that may be coming together soon.

Not to get all self-help on you, but I believe an important part of growing as a writer or even as a person is recognizing your flaws and doing something about them. I’m pretty good at the first part, it’s the second part I have problems with, but I am working on it. On that list is self-promotion. I don’t really tell anyone about this site, and if I want people to actually find my stuff that is going to have to change. I don’t have a plan yet, but I am on the edges of one.

I know this wasn’t a lot, but I intend to keep most of these posts short. Blogging about myself is not one of my skills, nor do I really need it to be, but doing these blogs is a way for me to keep this place in my thoughts.

Currently reading/listening to:
The Magician by Raymond E. Feist
Revival by Stephen King
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin

I have a problem. I love books, but sometimes I wonder if I love acquiring books more than reading them. That’s probably not true, but my “To Read” shelf has consistently held more books than my “Already Read” shelf. In fact, it has become enough of a problem that I have purchased books only to find that I already own them. To solve that problem, about a month ago I decided to catalog every novel in my library. I’ve used Goodreads before, but I’ve always been unimpressed. It’s too clunky, and never really provided the features I was looking for. Instead, I found My Library.

My Library only appears to be available through the Google Play Store currently, but it is wonderful. You can simply scan in books using their ISBN barcode, or if you have a collection with a lot of older books like me, you can look them up. The app pulls from multiple open source databases so you can select the best match. Some of the databases are better than others and you may have some cleanup to do afterward. You can even mark books as read, leave comments on individual books, and export your entire library into xls (from there you can go to CSV and get really crazy if you want).

I finished uploading my entire library the other day finally, and now I can give you some of the stats that I uncovered. These are all conveniently surfaced by the app. Let’s take a look:

Number of Books: 315
Number of Books Read: 122
Percentage of Books Read: 38.73%
Duplicates Discovered: 5
Most Popular Author: Larry Niven (24)
Second Most Popular Author: Clifford D. Simak (18)

I would like to get that read percentage much closer to 50% before I buy any more books, but I’m a slow reader, and the idea of reading 25.5 books before buying any is a little daunting. It’s worth noting that this little catalog largely discounts any books I’ve listened to on Audible or read on a device unless of course I also own them physically. I didn’t want to get too far into the weeds here… at least not yet.

If you skipped to the end of this post, you may have noticed that another book came off my reading list though. The Dispatcher by John Scalzi was wonderful. It’s a short book, and on Audible it has an expert performance by Zachary Quinto. This is one of those books that would translate very well into a movie. Definitely worth a listen or a read. Anyway, I’ve droned on for longer than I wanted to and delayed this post enough since my original title was Saturday Stats. Enjoy your week and enjoy the new story I posted Friday.

Currently reading/listening to:
The Magician by Raymond E. Feist
Revival by Stephen King
Back to the Moon by Homer H. Hickam Jr.
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin