You leap up, eager to engage. Yeah, you got work, but so what? You’re fucking ready! Give me coffee, tea, whatever, and stand back, ’cause here I come.
Other days –
The movement to remove yourself from that lovely bed is proceeded by a long sigh, a bit of ceiling staring, and an argument. “Is it really worth it today to get out of bed?” you ask yourself. “Can’t I just stay here all day?” Thoughts of responsibilities, deadlines, appointments and engagement roll over you like waves. Damn, you realize, I have to get up.
You throw the covers back and shove yourself free. Look out world, you promise. You hit me, I’m going to hit you back. Hard.
But some days –
Oh, Jesus, you think. Another day. There’s no end to them. I’m in a tunnel but there’s no light. Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. “I hate my life,” you whisper.
But, what must be done, must be done. So you get out of bed, a stoic embracing of your duties and trudge through the day, engaging as it must be done but trying not to use much of your energies. Not on days like this.
But other days –
Ha, ha, ha, you think, with a surreptitious glance at the clock and daylight, I don’t have to get up today. I can sleep in as long as I want. I can do whatever I want. And with that, you bound up, because this is your day. You can do whatever the fuck you want.
But some days –
You awake and arise. You don’t feel really rested but you don’t feel tired, either. You don’t know what you feel. There are things to be done but nothing is pressing on more than the immediate need to pee.
You think of the things that you need to do and what you might do. You might go some places. You might not.
Thoughts are accompanied by small mental shrugs of indifference. You’re not really happy. You’re not really sad.
You’re not really anything.
You and the day feel like an onion. Some peeling must be done before anything useful is found. You’re not even sure if you feel like peeling it, though. It’s not a question of energy or attitude. No, you don’t know what it is. To know that would require some peeling, and you don’t feel like peeling. Perhaps you will after having some coffee or tea, or being up a while, or maybe you’ll feel like it after getting cleaned up. Who knows?
Starting today with a visualizing exercise. WYSIWYG.
Visualize yourself writing. Completing the book.
See the finished book. See it on your desk, in your hand, and for sale online, and in book stores, on end cap displays, and tables. See it in the library.
Notice it in people’s hands as they go to their gates for flights. See it in others’ hands as they’re reading in the park and at the coffee shop. Hear it mentioned in conversations and discover it in reviews.
How far do you want to go with this? Detail your vision. Make it a rope that carries you through each session and day, through the months of processing and developing and into the sales and marketing arena. See it all the way through. Create it as your vision and feed your determination.
Close your eyes. Spread your eyes wide. Reach out and put your arms around a star.
Don’t let circumstances stop or distract you. Believe in yourself and keep going.
You can’t learn to walk without a few trips, stumbles and falls. Bike lessons typically involve an accident, too, when something goes astray. You lose your balance and fall, or forget how to brake and crash. The point there, as I’m so cleverly hiding it and I should make it clearer, is that to learn and succeed, you must take risks. With risks can come pain and failure. How you handle it all is where some of your best learning can arise.
With that in mind, I salute all those who attempted NaNoWriMo, no matter their result. More power to you for putting in on the line and trying. Fantastic, if you succeeded; I hope you keep going. Fantastic, if you failed; I hope you keep going, because you tried, brothers and sisters.
Now it’s Monday in some parts of the world. Morning, in a few neighborhoods. December is blooming everywhere. Summer and winter are rising, depending upon where you live. I hope you all have a December that you look back upon with fondness and satisfaction, that it’s a month when you think back upon and say, “It all started that year, 2016, in December. That’s the month when it all really came together and I knew.” Substitute whatever words you want in there for your moment, path and vision.
For me, it’s time to go write like crazy, at least one more time.
Last night’s dreams were a barrage of chaotic events and images. I vividly remember most of them (it?) because my left calf cramped. Pain shot me out of dreams into full wakefulness. Working the cramp, I remembered the dream.
I was travelling with my wife. We were hurrying through an airport. She was carrying all our baggage. It wasn’t much but included a brown paper shopping bag full of papers. “I can help,” I kept telling her. “Let me carry some of that.” I tried taking some. But no, she dismissed my urging and raced ahead. The airport was immaculate and wasn’t busy. We rushed through doors and across terminals and concourses.
Things were coming beginning to come out of the shopping back. “Here, wait, you’re losing things,” I told her, catching up. Slowing her, I tried re-organizing materials in the bag so they were more secure and suggested I take it, but she was too impatient and started off again.
And then we headed for an exit. I was bewildered. “But we didn’t go anywhere,” I said. “We didn’t fly anywhere.” Wordlessly, carrying the baggage, stopping to put papers back into the shopping bag, she prodded us to the exit.
Act two commenced. We were in a vehicle, I think. I never saw or heard it but we were on a divided white cement four lane highway. I couldn’t tell who was driving. Lightly traveled and free of potholes, the road followed curving green hills. The weather was pleasant. I could only see ahead of me and nothing of us or the car.
A bright orange car burst onto the highway ahead of us. Emitting blue smoke and loud noise out of its single large chrome exhaust pipe that came out the back, it looked like it was a home-made fiberglass creation on a shortened VW Beetle chassis. The car seemed barely under control. Accelerating to overtake one vehicle, it jumped lanes and almost hit another. Swerving back, it barely passed between two other vehicles.
We were commenting on the lack of control, what was going on in the driver’s head, and the vehicle’s construction and design, when they did lose control, spinning out as its engine gave up with a smoky, “BANG.”
We were on the scene instantly and then passing it, talking about stopping and helping – but then this crazy motorcyclist roared by. The rider was a young, well-groomed white man with short dark hair. He was driving insanely, cutting off a semi, causing it to crash, and then doing the same to another car.
This time, he wrecked. He got off his motorcycle, stared down at it a moment, and then started walking up the highway.
We were walking behind him. I could believe he was walking away from the mayhem he’d caused. His indifference appalled me. I raced up to him. Catching up, I began calling, “Hey, excuse me, hello,” before finally tapping his shoulder. Taller than me by at least eighteen inches, he was extremely skinny and white, and dressed in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves and a red neck tie that was loose around the collar. I began telling him, “Do you know what you did back there?” Unimpressed, he began leaving, but I held firm, holding onto him, taking him by his arm, and then his shoulder. I was amazed how muscular he was under his shirt.
I told him what he’d done. “So what?” he answered at last. “I’m working from home and McDonald’s has the right to send and receive faxes at my house. I can’t get any rest and I can’t get anything done.” Then the truck driver, a swarthy man a little shorter than me, caught up and entered into conversation with him.
My wife and I went on. We entered a terminal through a double metal door without any markings. Inside was messy and crowded with an old military base feel to it. Not much energy was put on decor. Food was available. We were hungry and perused the menu. Nothing was calling to us. We still wanted to order something but weren’t sure what we wanted to order, nor where to do it, but were beginning to grasp their system amidst the disorder.
Then it got chaotic. A disheveled greasy man appeared behind us. White, with stringy hair and a few days of beard, he was being disruptive. I didn’t know exactly what he was doing. He was just standing and grinning whenever I saw him. But I didn’t trust him. He was wearing sandals with no socks and baggy, dirty green pants.
Eventually something he did caused a commotion. He disappeared. Two police officers arrived. I could hear them talking about him but only heard fragments. They were attempting to find him. Slipping past them, I decided I could find him.
From here, the dream fractured into true incoherence. At this point, the point of view became external. I was watching myself and these scenes as though I watched a movie except I knew it was me and I wasn’t just sitting somewhere watching someone else. There was something about cutting our grass a certain manner and a bevy of strange rules being issued, rules that would undo what had succeeded. I was being urged to conform and obey. “They will ticket you if you don’t,” they told me. Everyone was worried about being ticketed.
“Enough of this,” I basically said. “I’m not doing that stuff.” I walked out, coming toward my watching vantage. My wife and others hurried behind me, talking to me, asking me to re-consider what I was doing but I was adamant. My dream’s last words were, “They’re just pieces of paper,” spoken by me.
I dreamed last night about the power of eight. That is literally and explicitly what the dream was about, no B.S. I remember all of this thanks to a cat.
I know that will surprise you.
In the dream, I was in a class with others but not a classroom. I don’t know who the others were. Someone unknown was explaining that the power of eight shapes everything. Basically in a ‘Matrix’ reveal, I was shown how streaming digits make up reality. Then we were told, “If you can find the power of eight in the numbers, you’ll unlock the power of creation.” Then, as we all talked and looked, I grasped that within the threads were sequences that added up to eight. As I realized the implications and began bubbling with the thrill of knowledge, I began showing them to the rest of the class and elaborating on the instructor’s explanation about how to see and capture the power of eight. As example, I explained, laughing, “Like this one.” I captured a sequence. “That’s eight hundred thousand dollars.”
At that point, whiskers, licking and kneading awakened me. Quinn the Black Paw was hungry. The food in the bowls didn’t suit his mood. It didn’t matter that it was oh dark A.M. Resigning myself the power of the cat, I fed him, and then used the opportunity to pee and ponder the dream.
I was pretty much at a loss about what it meant then. Like, what was I supposed to do? Take a pill and find an eight? Returning to bed, I resumed sleeping.
The lessons about the power of eight continued with further dreaming.They were explaining how the power of eight was part of a balance. But now, instead of being in a class room, I was standing atop stairs. Others, like my wife, accompanied me, but they were incidentals. Dark, dark, dark cheery red, these steps were worn smooth. Like contoured hillsides of rice paddies, they extended in either direction, leading down to something that I couldn’t see. In fact, the only other thing seen was a blue grey sky.
I knew I was to go down the stairs, and I did. This was a learning expedition, and I felt pretty good about the whole thing. My wife and a few others accompanied me. At the bottom was a land, and people who…well, they identified themselves as the common people. They explained I was to kill two of them.
That shocked me. It could not be right. But no, they were comfortable with my intentions. I’d done it before and others did it, too. They liked the way I killed them, demonstrating empathy and kindness when I did. Besides, they told me, I often gave others gifts. Which was true, I remembered then, as I absorbed it all. On the way down, I’d left and given packages as gifts.
Then, my instructions were to return to the top of the stairs and resume my lessons in the power of eight. I returned to the top of the stairs and awoke, confused.
What in the hell is the power of eight, and how am I supposed to harness any of that dream information in this real existence?
At that point, I wanted to return to dream with instructions to myself to provide further explanation. But sleep eluded me. Instead, I thought about my recent state of mind.
It’s been that time of month, when I’m coping with my darkness. Essentially, my darkness has a mission statement that I’m to feel so depressed and miserable that I question, why the hell am I even alive? Arriving in this depressed state, I become all, J’accuse: Thou art a shite writer writing shite fiction. Nobody wants to read the hot sloppy piles that you write, so why do you torture myself with this pursuit?
I know, intellectually, I’m coping with an emotional state that affect huge swaths of population. None of that really helps. I’d been reading to manage it. In the marvelous way that the world works, I’d come across a T.C. Boyle interview and a John Scalzi post. Both helped bolster my resistance to quit.
2. The .357 Magnum. The second tip goes (if you’ll forgive me) hand-in-hand with the first. In recognition of the fact that all writers are manic-depressives, alcoholics, drug-addicts and fixedly specialized degenerates, it’s always helpful to keep a loaded pistol on your desk, perhaps located conveniently beside the ballpeen hammer, depending, of course, on the size of the desk. This acts as an aide-memoire, a spur to creativity and, of course, the ultimate solution to writers’ block.
The other post, by John Scalzi, was Rejection. He closed:
In the meantime, I’ve already sent a query off to another agent. You can’t sit around moping after a rejection, you have to rush into the arms of the next rejection. Because who knows? It might not be a rejection at all.
Heartening words, the words that every writer embraces, the essence being, who knows when you’ll get your break? It’s a strange brew where writers reside. As other writers have written, we’ve developed good taste about what we like to read, and we’re attempting to envelope that good taste in what we write in a difficult and often lonely, and solitary endeavor. And I, being of low self-esteem and a person who eschews attention, struggle with writing and wanting attention for what I write against being a solitary creature who is pretty happy writing in his isolation. It’s a messed up, strange brew. And again: I know I’m not alone.
I told my wife about my dream this morning.She suggested I hunt down meanings for the power of eight. Doing a web search, I came across Christine DeLorey’s website, Creative Numerology. She’d specifically written about ‘The Power of Eight’.
Reading her post reinforced my understanding of the dream. Frankly, I was startled by having such a dream and then discovering such explanation on the web. I’d wondered if I’d read about the power of eight before, and had simply regurgitated previously required knowledge.
I don’t know. My wife’s book club met last night. Their book in discussion was ‘Ordinary Grace’. As always, they investigated the author, William Kent Krueger. They’d discovered some good interviews with him that she shared with me, where he discussed his frustrations with writing novels and trying to become published. I mentioned that’s what writers, including me, are always seeking, that perfect strange brew where the good taste that we’ve acquired through reading is blended with the good taste we infuse in our writing, but also with the good taste that civilization displays by finding and reading our work. It’s a very, very strange brew, and none of us are sure of the exact ingredients.
But my wife closed, “Well, you can’t stop writing. Writing is part of the Perfect M. Writing is your drug, and it keeps you balanced.”
M is my private nickname, BTW, to clarify. I began using that initial to sign things like a zillion plus years ago and she adopted it as her term for me. But she’s right. I write because I need to write. Everything else is just the strange brew of being.
And now, since it’s the song that I sang to myself while walking down to write, here’s another shot at today’s theme song: ‘Strange Brew’, by Cream, 1967.
On a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990, Rowling wrote her initial Potter ideas on a napkin. She typed her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on a typewriter, often choosing to write in Edinburgh cafés, accompanied by baby daughter Jessica, now 19, named after Jessica Mitford, a heroine of Rowling’s youth. ~ J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and other novels.
In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? Three weeks later, Susan sold The Help to Amy Einhorn Books. ~ Kathryn Stockett, author of ‘The Help’.
After she wrote Still Alice and was ready to get it into the market, Lisa spent a year trying to get literary agents and editors at publishing houses to speak with her. The editors all treated her as yet another aspiring writer not worth their time, and the few literary agents she managed to reach thought her novel wouldn’t sell. ~ Lisa Genova, author of ‘Still Alice’.
The situation was improbable. Just one year prior, Weir, a computer programmer by trade, had given up hope of becoming a professional writer after failing to get a single agent or publisher excited about his work. But then he posted The Martian online, and it generated such buzz that now here he was, signing mid-six-figure deals with both Crown Publishing and Twentieth Century Fox. His self-publishing success story—well-paid tech nerd becomes really well paid novelist—made him the envy of every would-be author who ever fantasized about ditching his day job. Even critics were on board. (“Brilliant. A celebration of human ingenuity and the purest example of real sci-fi for many years,” said The Wall Street Journal.) ~ Andy Weir, author of ‘The Martian’.
He pitched the book and was rejected 27 times before a chance encounter with a friend who had just landed an editing job. Geisel told his friend about his book, about the rejection, and told him he was fed up and about to destroy the book. The friend read it and Dr. Seuss was born. ~Theodore Geisel, author of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ and other books.
It’s just something to think about. You, and your good taste and writing skills, may be unknown and yet still be a brilliant writer and yet still be unpublished and unknown.
And you, along with the editors, publishers, agents, family members and critique group who rejected you, might all be right. You don’t ‘deserve’ publication. And you do.
If you go into Amazon and read some novels, you’ll discover scathing reviews of great classics and best-sellers. And there are books like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, which I didn’t like, that began as fan fiction published on a website and ended up as a best seller and movie.
You can’t predict what will happen so invest that energy elsewhere. Write like crazy. Plan and write. Revise and edit. Establish a process or system and keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Write because you enjoy writing. Write a book in a month in November. Do what it takes. Believe in yourself. Keep believing.
It’s the best kind of day when I start out and have a purpose. The purpose can be born out of anything – writing, walking, hiking, cleaning, organizing, or whatever. But to have that sitting in my mind, “Yes, today is the day I am going to do this,” is powerfully rewarding to me. Because my energy is already aimed toward a target, my mind is engaged, and my will is determined.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. Unleash the insanity.
“You’re flirting with disaster,” people have told me just about all of my life.
To me, they’re saying, “You’re taking a risk.”
You betcha. Take a risk. Tug on Superman’s cape, pee in the wind…no; those are not flirting with disaster.
Flirting with disaster is about assessing a situation’s intangibles and variables and deciding, “I can do this. I can make this happen.” Others’ impressions that you’re flirting with disaster is more about their state of mind than it is about the situation.
Everything I write seems to be flirting with disaster – which, as an assessment, is about my state of mind. But that’s why we have editing and delete buttons.
Here is Molly Hatchet’s ‘Flirtin With Disaster’, from 1979. It’s a good theme song to hum as you walk the day and make decisions.
Michael Seidel, writer 