Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Strip away the ego.
Shred your fears and doubts.
Subdue your self-loathing, and write, write, write.
Write deeply and fully. Write like nobody but you will ever read it, like nobody but you will ever judge it.
Write, write, write.
Do you hear?
It feels like I’m talking to myself.
Everyday has a feel. Lot of that feel is conditioned into us by work and school. It’s hard to shed the feel.
Today is Thursday but feels like Friday. I could blame it on my friends. Fifteen of us met last night and hoisted a few beers. I enjoyed the Caldera Brewing Pilot Rock Porter, a most excellent beverage. I had two point five points so I don’t believe that’s the problem with today.
I worked and exercised, of course. Walked six miles, which is about my average, so no great shakes there. Had roasted veggie pizza for dinner. I don’t think that’s the problem nor why today feels like Friday.
No, I believe my problem resides with less than sufficient sleep. The Fitbit reports I had less than six and a half hours. For that, I blame the cats.
The four of them seemed very very. I don’t know what – very very catish? They ate their food and wanted more. They were inside and wanted out. Then, OMG, it’s cold outside, LET ME IN! Hearing the others, they would present a need to go investigate to see what HE’s up to without knowing who HE is. The four are male cats, felines who wandered in from the streets and declared our house is their house. Each has one issue or another.
My wife claims a big problem is that they’re all males, full of themselves and territorial. “It would be different if one of them was a female. Cats are matriarchal. A female would create some order.”
She could be right but I’m not getting a fifth cat to prove it. There is a fifth, a female. Pepper lives next door but loves our front porch and hangs out there about twelve hours out of a twenty-four hour period. She doesn’t seem to be establishing any order. Her only thought to order is, “Hey, hey, hey, give me something to eat. Hey, hey.” And I do because cats have established mind control over me.
So it feels like Friday because I feel tired. I’m ready for the weekend even though the weekend has no concrete meaning for me. It’s just Saturday after Friday, and Sunday after Saturday, and the day before Monday. Other than the spelling of the days and the hours of some businesses, they’re all Anyday and Everyday.
Okay, rant over. Got my mocha. Tastes awesome. Another sip or two and I’ll be ready to write like crazy, at least one more time. I’ll see where the story takes me.
I just realized that in the space of my future, there are no days of the week. It’s all Anyday and Everyday.
Imagine that.
Charles French had a post on Arrowhead Publishing a few weeks ago. Its subject was creating business plans for books. I’d come to a similar conclusion to his ideas on my own a few years ago as part of my quest for greater organization, but his ideas had greater depth than mine. It’s always good to find something like that and learn more.
But after reading his post, I continued along thinking I’d begun weeks ago about the need for larger involvement in the business side of my self-publishing efforts. And after reading French’s post, I realized that I’d conceived many of the needs and ideas required but had failed to execute.
I had the dream. I had an action plan. I wasn’t acting.
After considering that realization with irritation and annoyance with myself that ended with a stern lecture, I answered myself, with some plaintiveness, as the business persona of my being, I’m not given much time or energy for taking care of business. The writer gets the most attention and indulgence. That’s followed by the husband, friend and son. Then the human gets attention (for things like time off, socializing, partying and exercising beyond the daily ritual of decompressing), and the editor, leaving crumbs to the business person.
I agree, I answered. Part of this is because I don’t to do the business side. But accept it: it must be done.
Okay. What can we do about it?
Well, like writing in the beginning and everything else, it’s about allocating time. I’d planned to give these matters attention – that’s why I was annoyed – but permitted my resources to be diverted into other things, important things like killing time by playing computer games, reading books, or playing with cats. Just as I do for everything else, I need to structure recurring time in my life for the business side of publishing.
And it is a recurring need. Publishing and selling books is as dynamic as any marketplace. As an unknown with no name recognition trying to learn the business, I need to work harder, as hard as an athlete trying to make a team, or a writer writing a book. As I wrote in a post when I began thinking about this, I Will Do Better, my efforts are meager and weak. It’s shocking to realize that I wrote that in the middle of January.
Once again, I remind myself, intentions aren’t sufficient. Just as writing in the first place, exercising, or acquiring and degrees, focus and application are needed. I can’t accept that, oh, I did this, and now I’m done. No, this is very much trail and error. It should all be considered as a first draft. Sometimes the blurb written and used isn’t working. New venues for publishing, distributing, advertising and selling are always springing up. If I want to expand my sales, I need to expand my efforts.
Okay, but I already knew all of this. I wasn’t acting on them. This was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Just as I need structure to pursue writing my fiction, I need structure for selling it. Moving the business guy up in the order of priorities isn’t necessarily needed, either. Rather, I realized that I needed to remind myself that the business side needs to be attended.
So I jumped into my Google calendar and set up reminders. Do this, do that. Check this, check that. And I set aside time via reminders to research and read about the business aspect of publishing and selling my own work.
Writing, publishing and selling isn’t a destination. Just like life and living, it’s a journey to be embraced and taken every day. Recognize what must be done but recognize it doesn’t need to all be done at once.
But recognize, it must be done and keep going.
My mental writing garden is such a messy place. I’m a gardener way behind his duties. Books need advertising and publishing in other venues. Finished drafts that have resided in drawers for years require editing, covers, publishing. More books are planned, others in progress. I feel like I never write enough nor do enough. There’s always more.
But into this blow the volunteers, ideas that land and begin sprouting. I already have dozens of those sprouting as potential products. From a conversation last night came another.
We were at dinner at Pie + Vine (I had the pomodoro with chicken – excellent – with a glass of Chianti). A blizzard was blanketing the Ashland evening. We thought we were done with that winter mess but it started raining – snowing – blowing between dazzling displays of sunshine earlier in the day. Now the snow had resolved to be serious. The temperature dropped and the white stuff stuck.
Another couple was with us. They were just back from Hawaii. The plan was to have dinner and catch up and then attend a preview presentation of the OSF production of ‘Shakespeare in Love’. They were talking about properties in Hawaii and asking if we were interested in becoming a fractional owner in one. Then they began speaking about ‘the January tenants’.
OMG, ‘The January Tenants’. Doesn’t that seem like a natural title for a movie or novel? It could be black comedy, mystery, thriller, or a combination of all. How about a YA zombie combination of the rest? Such possibilities were exploding. My writer leaped forward to begin writing up a concept.
“Shhh, shhh, not now,” I told him. “I’m at dinner. I’m socializing. Besides, there are so many other projects ahead of you – get in the queue.”
He wasn’t happy.
Bugger him. Writers are rarely happy, in my experience. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
We headed into town, not too early, to have coffee and take a walk. We meandered the streets and alleys, climbing stairs, examining new businesses and wondering about old ones.
The creek was visited to gage how high and fast that water ran, and low spots were inspected to see what protections are up against flooding. Talk turned to books – talk always turns to books – and we drifted into the book stores. The first one was visited because she likes the energy she gets from book stores. Book stores always help her forget recent history and the ugly hairpin turns of the latest politics.
In that first book store was a Tana French novel. I examined it to see if we’d read it and decreed we had not read ‘The Secret Place’, and nor was it her latest. We’re getting behind on our reading!
Next followed an examination of Lisa Lutz’s newest book. This was not another of the Spellman files. We’d enjoyed the Spellman series. They were light, entertaining reads. We’d read good things about her latest, ‘The Passenger’, but we passed with promises to buy it another day, or perhaps wait until it could be acquired used.
On we went to the other book store, where the air is thick with the enriching scent of fresh books. Along the way, we talked about ‘The Likeness’, and how much our late neighbor, Walt, didn’t like that book, thinking the underlying concept was too far-fetched and not believable in his mind. We sought a used book of ‘The Secret Place’ – we like recycling books and stretching our dollars – but only ‘The Likeness’ was available.
Off we went on our meandering way, like cats sniffing the paths left by other animals. She told me of the book she was reading about Robert Louis Stevenson. She’d not realized, or maybe had forgotten, that he’d written ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. She remarked, “He was all about his writing, from the way his life is told, a lot like you. He was all, ‘Grrr, don’t disturb my writing,’ just like you get.”
I let it pass with a smile. He’s not like me, and I’m not like him. We’re just writers.
Those poor non-writers rarely understand.
Of the three dreams remembered from last night, the third was the most striking.
The first was of the usual military variety. Back on active duty, I’m to attend a planned changing of the guard ceremony, except I don’t have my ribbons and medals, and my uniform isn’t pressed. They specifically told us three days before that our uniforms needed to be pressed. Why didn’t I go out right away and have that done, I kept asking myself. There were others in the same situation. They asked the same question. Meanwhile, many people were rallying around us, trying to help us.
But I was distracted. There had been a death of someone close to me the Friday before. I don’t often dream of death, and my dream being struggled to cope with it.
The second dream was of the usual visual gibberish involving rising water. Streams, lakes, rivers, everywhere I went, I encountered rising brown water. While the images remind me this week of the scenes from I-5 flooding in Redding, the Oroville Dam situation, and other flood scenes in the news, the dream events didn’t disturb me. I always ‘knew’ I was protected but I worried about others. This is a variation of a regular dream that I’ve had for decades. I used some of the dream memories in ‘Everything in Black & White,’ a novel I wrote a few years ago but haven’t published. The hero encountered flooding and ended up encountering, fighting and saving other survivors. These were the first people he’d seen since the Great Collapse.
The third dream was something new and different for me. I was busy writing. Writing, writing, writing. I was writing on everything I could find. I was possessed to write.
The neighborhood residents were all helping me. They knew I was a writer and knew I was writing, but didn’t know what I was writing. But individuals would come to me with more scraps of paper, pens and notebooks to use so I could write. They fed me so I could write, and kept unobtrusively trying to keep me comfortable as I wrote. I lived in a large apartment with my family. We had several cats. A canal was outside of my apartment. People lived across the way, including a family from India. They were most watchful and helpful to me although I sensed they were poor and struggling.
They had two cats who had been injured. I took the cats in, fixed them up with robot exo-skeletons and nursed them to good health. One cat immediately rushed back to its people. I could see them receive it. The two children were very happy, and the mother knew I’d helped. A whole confused segment followed about their yard and improvements they made along the bank. My wife and I would stroll each day, see the changes, and discuss doing something similar.
But the second cat had disappeared. I was busy writing but found the cat living in my house. He’d grown to a very large size and had mastered walking upright. He rushed out of the house. I worried about where he was going and what would happen to him, so I followed.
All this time, I’m writing. I’m writing as I do everything. I stroll and write. I find a piece of paper and write. I follow the cat and write. I see the cat has made it home yet I feel compelled to go over and tell the people that the cat had been with me and safe. Before I can do that, the husband visits me. Young, he’s barefoot and very intelligent. His aura of calm intelligence awes me.
I’m sitting at a table writing. He gets on the table top to speak with me. He’s wearing gray sweat pants and a white tee shirt. It’s all so clean, it looks new. Lying on his side, he curls up and talks to me, smiling as he does. He challenges me with questions and challenges my answers with questions and observations. I don’t remember those details but as we’re talking, I’m writing. We talk for a while as I write but something happens and interrupts our visit. He leaves for his house across the canal.
After some thought, I decide to follow. The canal water has become much higher. It’s a narrow canal. I think about leaping it. I have new shoes on, though. A female friend present said, “I hope you’re not thinking about jumping that canal,” which is exactly what I’m thinking. She then keeps trying to convince me not to make the jump.
I don’t attempt the jump but instead attempt to cross via rocks. I misjudge the distances and end up in deeper water with my new shoes. But it’s all good.
I enter the people’s home. They’re busy in the back with the returned cat. I can hear that the children are very pleased. I’m an intruder and prepare to leave without fulfilling my mission of telling them what had happened with the cat. But I’m writing. And there is a typewriter. It’s an old manual portable. I sit down and begin typing on it. I can’t help myself.
The young mother comes out. I apologize for using her typewriter and being there without permission. She dismisses my apology. I begin explaining who I am and why I’m there. She dismisses my explanation, telling me with a gentle smile, she knows who I am, and it’s fine. She offers food. I decline and state that I must leave. But she has made up the guest bed for me with soft downy blankets and sheets. No, I insist on leaving. “Then I must put the bedding back away,” she replies in a flirtatious manner, “after all this work that I’ve done.” “I’ll help,” I answer. She tells me that it’s not necessary but I pick up and fold a blanket.
But then I must write. Sitting down at the typewriter, I start typing.
The end.
The question rattling around during my walk was, “Do you need to understand love to understand hate?”
It was strictly a writing question but properly prompted by St. Valentine’s Day posts. I’d reach my own satisfying answer but desired another’s input.
Shannon was the barista working at the coffee shop. A bubbling avowed Christian, her dress today startled me, partially because she wore a crown of roses in her hair. “Hello, flower girl,” I greeted her.
Shannon bubbled as she does. “I love Valentine’s Day. It’s my favorite holiday.”
“You like all holidays, don’t you? I know you love Thanksgiving.”
“Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. I love love. I don’t have a boyfriend so I bought flowers and gifts for my room mates to celebrate.”
“So…do you need to understand hate in order to understand love?”
Shannon considered the question. “I grew up in a very loving, Christian family. I didn’t really encounter hate until I was a little older. Then…it helped me…appreciate love more. I don’t think you need to understand hate to understand love but encountering hate makes you appreciate love more.”
I thanked her, understanding her take. It’s like loving life more and appreciating it more after near-death experiences or personal losses, or being thankful for what you have after having nothing or almost nothing.
Not all will react the same, of course. I know some people who avow they’re thankful for what they have because they had nothing. But they’re so angry and bitter that they once had nothing, that in many ways, they strike me as still having nothing, because they can’t let go of how they once lived.
There’s always the one hand, and the other, on how these things can affect us. That’s what I go through with my characters, thinking through and feeling their reactions in response to their past and present, understanding where they’re at and why, and then telling their story.
Note: my conversation with Shannon is presented in abridged form here. She spoke, and I listened. I hope I correctly portrayed her point.
I’m mostly a self-driven vehicle, writing out of need to imagine and tell stories, and entertaining myself. Mostly, I energize via reading what I’ve written, editing and revising it and pressing on. Mostly, I write from practice and habit, walking to awaken the muse, giving her a mocha to encourage her engagement, and then shutting off everyone in me except the writer.
Mostly.
But that’s all about the writing side. The damn business side is depressing. The need for accepting rejection, considering advertising campaigns, hunting for copy-editors, beta readers, cover designers, publishing venues, publishers and agents are all depressing.
I’m not nuanced in demographics and specific costs structures, operating margins, etc., of the publishing industry, but I do understand that it’s an involved, expensive business on the traditional side, and it’s a crowded field in the self-publishing and digital publishing arenas. I understand on emotional, physical, intellectual and financial levels about the difficulties with finding representations, publishers, sales and readers.
That doesn’t make me feel any better.
I read fiction and non-fiction to study and absorb others’ ways with ideas, stories, characters, plots, words, settings, beginnings, middles and ends. I read them because I enjoy them. I want to be entertained and I want to escape.
But I read other writers ‘like me’ for true incentive about writing, dealing with rejection, and why it’s difficult to solve the writing, publishing, sales and marketing puzzles. Writers are my tribe; we write because we often feel we must, or we’re addicted to the dream or the process, or we’re using it to therapy to cope with who and what we seem to be.
Several families co-exist in that tribe. One family consists of the writers who have made it – King, Rowling, Chabon, Frantzen, Erdrich, Collins, Lee, Green – how many need be named? We each have our writing heroes.
My family is that other one, the family of writers who write each day, wonder how much writing is enough writing, publish short stories online, the writers who are struggling not to write, but to live and exist as a successfully published writer. I spent much time with their words and blogs online. I take comfort in our shared misery of struggling. It allows me to say, “See, it’s not just me. It’s not just Michael Seidel.”
And that’s a relief. I often think it is just Michael Seidel. I often feel like I’m right on the cusp of making a breakthrough and then the moment is gone. It’s exasperating and debilitating. Yet, I sense other writers live in that same zone by the words they write online.
From them, I get my fuel. Because sometimes, I want to stop. Sometimes the muse asks, “Excuse me, but are we wasting our time here?” Sometimes the internal writer agrees, “Yeah, shouldn’t we just go wash and wax the car and have a beer, or volunteer for some charities, or go find a job? Wouldn’t any one of those things be more productive than the daily rituals we follow?”
But my family of writers and I all answer, “No.” I can elaborate, “You’re not correctly measuring what it means to be productive, that being creative and imaginative is more worthwhile to me than those tasks you ask me to undertake instead.”
We know this. Commercial and critical success is a matter of validation and pride. It’s driven in part by family and friends asking us, “How is the book coming along? When will I be able to read it?” They do not understand the difficulties not just in writing, but in getting published and noticed, of making sales.
Usually, we don’t bother to explain the intricacies their question deserves. Nodding, we just tell them, “It’s coming along.”
Then we add the exchange to our fuel.
I dreamed three dreams last night. There were repeats of dreams I’ve dreamed before. Like watching a movie more often, more details have developed, or are noticed and retained.
The dreams involve me to different degrees. I’m heavily involved in the first dream, less involved in the second one, and I’m almost phased out wholly by the third. The third dream is mostly about black women getting on an aircraft. The aircraft is a C-5 Galaxy. They’re happy and excited about a journey they’re about to take. I’m happy and excited for them, too, but most of my involvement is listening to them and seeing close-up shots of all those happy people going on a journey.
The first one, that so involved me, was mostly adventure. About me and a group escaping, and then exploring, the dream begins after the escape. I don’t know what we’re escaping. The group is small. We find a cold, icy place to stay until we’re rescued. Once we’re in that place, we discover there are items left behind, and that we’re in what was once a military post. Then we learn the post isn’t entirely abandoned. Little by little, we slip in and integrate, making use of things we see the military using. The military isn’t malicious or anything; they’re simply there, going about their business as it’s been on so many military bases I visited.
No family was in the dream. So it goes. I never feel threatened or frightened in the dream. I’m a little wary initially but that changes quickly as I relax and gain confidence. By the end, when I’m using the military’s stuff, part of them but not one of them, I’m a confident leader.
The second dream is a lame sequel to the first, almost like a set-up to the third. There’s abstract discussions about what happened – “We survived, we found this place, now we can help others” – and sort of a montage of things like that being done. Then, it’s on to the third dream.
I write about the dreams to understand them. Frankly, I don’t. They seem hopeful but beyond that, I can sketch any number of meanings to them. All those meetings would have strength, weakness, logic and flaws to my interpretations. I sometimes think I should devote more time to understanding them but I see that as a major investment in time. I like to guard my time and routines.
Which brings me around to my conclusion. Do my dreams need to have significance, meanings, or portends to other matters? Perhaps it’s sufficient to accept, I dreamed. My mind has cleared some clutter from my thinking. Maybe it’s like organizing the attic; “Oh, here we have some leftover stuff. Where should we put it?” “Stick it in a dream.” “Oh, okay.”
It’s odder and a little more intriguing that I have repeat dreams. Do I have some frozen synapses causing the same images, sounds, ideas and stories to circulate through my mind? Such thoughts trigger comparisons to similarities in my writing. I often address time, memory, reality, technology and alienation in my fiction writing, whether it’s the mystery series or the science-fiction novels.
This leads to insights and suspicions. Perhaps I need more outside input and stimulus. I’m in ruts of living and writing, constrained by others’ health issues, concerns and worries, and have been for some time. Perhaps my dreams are a reflection of my ‘real’ situation, and that’s why they’re repeating, and why I’m so little involved. I’m often a spectator within my own life, another rider on the train.
Not too long ago, I read an article about a woman who often fantasizes during the day. Her pattern of thought developed when she was a child but she realized she continued them as an adult, and that they were connected to regular activities. She recognized that when she does certain activities, she likewise engages in fantasies, and they’re often the same or similar fantasies.
Becoming more interested in what she was doing and why, she searched for evidence that others were doing something like this, and found she wasn’t alone in this habit.
Well, I could have told her that; I also do this.
At first, this behavior was helpful in falling asleep. I engage it and knew it as a way to shut off my brain so I could sleep and rest. Later, I extended it and began engaging to turn off my brain from other issues. I’ve always recognized it as a coping practice to de-stress, but they’re also a way to engage my subconscious mind to think, develop solutions and ideas. These fantasies are harmless, about designing survival places, trains or ships, but I can see parallels to my dreams, and to my fiction writing practices.
In a curious way, I begin to view myself as a pie. Then we can slice me up into my various activities and realms – writing, sleeping and dreaming, walking and living, interacting with others. When I begin doing that, I can see how the whole fits together in a larger pattern. I can see my limitations and frustrations, and how they manifest themselves through fiction writing, daytime activity fantasies, and yes, nocturnal dreams. I can see how other dreams were wish-fulfillment that I matter more than I do, that I have a starring role in something, somewhere, that I am not just another blink of consciousness among the trillions of blinks on Earth.
For better or worse, the dreams are part of the whole necessary to complete me. That isn’t a permanent or complete answer, nor even a deep insight. It’s just another glimpse of an entity and a life.
It just happens to be a very personal view.
I took the day off from novel writing yesterday. OMG, I hated doing so.
I hated taking time off from work back in the days when I worked or was in the military. Even when off, I checked in, kept in touch, monitored things and was ready to take care of problems. I was never really off.
The same goes on with my writing efforts. I frequently write in my head and love sitting down and writing a few hours every day. Writing provides me with intense joy and satisfaction. That’s great, I love that I receive emotional and intellectual rewards for my efforts. But, I’ve conditioned myself to write every day. I love that structure.
I cling to that structure.
I knew all that.
I hated knowing because knowing means I could either be willfully ignorant and act in bad faith, or I could ‘do the right thing’.
A Resist Trump march going on in Medford was the wedge issue. My wife wanted to attend and felt it important to attend. I wanted to attend but I wanted to write. I’d put off a lifelong desire to write and pursue my dreams to provide us security and help her pursue her career. Surely I deserve to pursue my dream.
Besides that, Michael, I told myself. You’ll be in a crowd, with all that this means. I’m not a social person. People are energy sucks for me. I’d be waaay out of my comfort zone.
Being out of my comfort zone is supposed to be good for me. Supposed to help me grow.
Yeah, but I don’t wanna grow. Can’t I just stay as I am? Can’t I just be selfish? Damn it, no.
Damn it.
The other aspect of this was working around the march period. We were meeting up at 11:40 AM. The location was thirty minutes away by car. The march itself was to be from noon to 1:30. Basically, I consider that the meat of the day. I could push, get up early, wiggle in some writing time beforehand. I considered the logistics and issues with this, knowing the Boulevard opens early enough, but is busy early and very full. Chances of finding a table were low.
I could write afterward. If I was truly dedicated, I would, but here is where my crutches were employed, things like my energy levels and writing preferences.
I could try writing at home.
Yes, I’ve tried that multiple times. It’s hugely disappointing and frustrating, partially because its silence highlights the interruptions, and the interruptions are of a personal nature.
That left me with not writing.
This so bothered me that I didn’t sleep Monday night. According to Fitbit, I achieved a little over three hours.
I understand myself, and I don’t understand myself. I can control myself and I can’t control myself. I’m such a conflicted person.
Worse, and not surprising, was that since I didn’t write, my writer wasn’t happy and kept pushing words and scenes into front center stage during the march. Apparently nobody notified him that I was taking the day off.
As if he’d care. He and the muse have independent contracts. The contracts stipulate they’re required to use my mind and body to do my writing, but they don’t always accept the limitations incumbent in that arrangement.
TG I’m back here today, coffee at hand, free and ready to write like crazy again, at least one more time.
Here I go. Three…two…one….
Blast-off.
Michael Seidel, writer 