I’m sure a lot of other people do too. Handheld gaming consoles. Cell phones that also play TV shows. My mother just picked up a new iPod Nano and damn, is that thing slick. Touch screen, bright display, bigass internal storage… as they say, “the woiks.”
Writers especially seem to like gizmos. Scrivener is something of a software gizmo for writers that other writers will not stop raving about. Nevermind that, unlike the true artists out there, I don’t own a Mac. The aforementioned Shuffle’s the only iProduct I own. Still, I see a lot of creative folks making good use of iProducts – Chuck Wendig is using his iPad to tell tales of the Dreaded Dawntaint in his travels.
But I have to wonder. How much of banging on keys actually constitutes “writing”? We bang on keys to communicate, to play games, to balance checkbooks, search for stuff on the Internet, the list goes on. Writing is a different process in our minds, yes, but procedurally it seems like there’s little to keep it from all mushing together into one long amorphous string of fevered keystrokes.
For my part, just like a Nook or Kindle will never replace the weight of a real book in my hands, no keyboard or LCD monitor will ever replace the tactile satisfaction I get by pouring my creativity onto a piece of paper through the medium of pen. There’s a notebook in a vinyl cover from the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh that contains the last third or so of Citizen in the Wilds. And when the going gets tough in my process, I toss out all the modern trappings and get back to basics. I put pen to paper.
Case in point, the ever-elusive query. I simply couldn’t figure out why the damn thing isn’t coming together in a way that any person who isn’t me interested in reading this book, let alone selling it. So on the train home on Friday, after I finished George RR Martin’s excellent novel A Game Of Thrones, I broke out the binder and my pen and started jotting down notes. I think I have a line on making a query that’s decent but just waiting to be rejected into a query that’ll grab the attention of someone who sees it cross their desk.
Now, I realize that in both typing out this blog post and translating the ideas born from the notes I’ve jotted into an electronic text file, I may come across as being a little hypocritical. But I’m also not going for an “unplugged” sort of lifestyle. Like I said, I love gizmos and I’m going to be using them for many, many years to come.
It’s just nice and fulfilling, on occasion, to do things the old-fashioned way.
This was an image I originally hunted down for use in the potential video project of turning the IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! review of Emperor’s New Groove into an entry in the Escapist’s contest. However, it’s feeling more and more like I won’t have time to even think about seriously working on such a project. More to the point, to work on that project would take time away from the frustratingly gradual process of refining a novel to its publishable form. It’s been bothering me for days, sometime to the point that I can’t even stand to look in that folder’s general direction.
The query for Citizen in the Wilds has been the major struggling point for me. A lot of the sentiments and experiences I’m about to convey are going to feel like a pale echo of stuff that’s been said before and in a much better and more useful way here. And, at the expense of tooting my own writer’s war-horn, I’m making progress. I’m confident enough in my skills to say that what I’ve written (in the novel, mind, not the query, that’s still kind of meandering around) is good. I just worry that it isn’t good enough.
Why?
I feel I may be too close to it.
Hence the Police-flavored title. See what I did there?
Anyway, my big fear along with the usual little ones of not being good enough, smart enough, charismatic enough or prompt enough to grab and hold the attention of an agent is that I’m too close to the work. I’ll be looking for grammatical errors, hunting down darlings and re-examining passages with such myopic focus that I’ll miss some big glaring issue that will keep this from getting published. I think it’s part and parcel of being the sort of person who fixates on games along with being a general media sink: I’ll zone in on something of a particular interest to me, at times to the exclusion of all else. In other words, expect my blog posts to be a bit less substantial in content when Cataclysm actually releases, in other words, provided I haven’t decided to play through the Mass Effect games for the seventeenbazillionth time instead.
I’m wandering off my point again, but this is less of a coherent advice-focused blog post and more of a stream-of-consciousness infodump. I’m sure you’ve picked up on that already, and if you didn’t you’re either on some other, better-written site or looking up an old ICFN to hear me rant about how badly something sucks because we just don’t have enough Internet critics yet.
My point is that I am aware of the fact that this myopia is a problem inherent with geeks in general, gamers in particular and me most of all. Compounding the problem is the fact that I don’t know what the Achilles heel of my own work is, because in the act of creating it I have inextricably put myself in very close proximity to it. I’m not about to run to the mountaintop declaring that the salvation of fans of high fantasy is at hand with this tome, fuck no, but I’m also not operating under the impression that it’s absolute shit. What I will say is that my goal is mostly to have it not be mediocre, the sort of easy-to-crank-out guaranteed-to-sell-to-morons schlock I’ve decried on many an occasion here. But my dilemma is while I strive to avoid those things that piss me off about said schlock, I may be writing a different kind of schlock entirely and not even really know it.
I can say “this doesn’t work and needs a rewrite” or “this is unnecessary and I need to bypass it before I take it out back and put a bullet in its brainpan.” What I’m struggling with is saying “Overall, this book is really about X in the context of Y but element Z undermines or detracts from that central theme or narrative throughline.” This is probably why the query is such a tremendous hurdle for me to clear. Ultimately I am unsure if the proper course of action is to hand it to someone I trust to read critically from start to finish or to put myself through the editorial process as many times as it takes, but the fact I can’t shake is that I might just be too close to it.
It’s a “forest for the trees thing.” I can tell this tree is an oak and that over there’s a pine, but I have no idea how big the forest actually is, how close the nearest river or roadkill-strewn freeway might be or how much (if any) of it is on fire because I forgot to stamp out my stogy properly and now HOLY SHIT IT’S SMOKEY THE BEAR AND HE’S PISSED OFF AT ME RUN JUST GODDAMN RUN. I wouldn’t see it coming. I’m nose-deep in bark and needles trying to get the sticky sap out of my beard and the sharp plantlife out of my eyeballs. I’m too obsessed with details to realize that the kind and gentle guardian reminding me that only I can prevent forest fires is only wearing that park ranger hat because he ate the last park ranger that trashed his woods.
I really don’t know how else to express this impasse I seem to have reached. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m writing this properly. I’m uncertain if I should be pestering those brave souls who’ve volunteered to test-read the thing to give me more feedback, or if I need to keep to the writer tradition of the bitter isolationist hermitage into the editorial chambers. And I remind myself that no matter what I do I’m likely to still receive a shitload of rejections long before I even remotely grab the attention of someone in a position to help me turn a hundred thousand words of fantasy fiction arranged in a particular order into something that actually pays my fucking bills.
I do this because I’m crazy. I do this because I hate myself. I do this because I’m sick of working dayjobs.
And, deep down, I do this because, frustration and depression and bad metaphors and all, I love it.
I just need to not be so close to it. Otherwise, I may lose sight of how good it actually is.
A lot of my friends and associates, like myself, enjoy reading, watching or experiencing media in which human beings are placed in mortal danger. We move humans from cover to cover while shooting at other living things. We watch as political scandals unfold. We read about intrepid people delving into the darkness beneath the earth.
It’s fun, diverting and sometimes thought-provoking, but when it happens in real life, it can be a very different story.
For example, a lot of the gamers on X-Box Live playing a first-person shooter love to go on and on about how badass they are. But how often do these kids move off of the couch and off to their local recruiter? Does the thought even occur to them that holding a real gun and shooting at real brown people might satisfy them in ways holding a controller and shooting at digitized brown people never really can? Hell, paintball battles are frantic enough, can these people even fathom how terrifying it would be to try and make their way across an open area covered by people with assault rifles?
The reason this is on my mind is because the miners in Chile are being rescued after two months. In fantasy RPGs, players are often underground or delving into haunted dark hallways for a very long time. Most players are either alone or in a small party. In the context of a game, this is no problem. But when you’re actually in the deep darkness by yourself for an extended period of time, bad things happen. Those guys in Chile were taken care of in many ways and kept each other sane as much as possible.
Anyway, this dichotomy between the settings and circumstances of a game setting and a real-life one isn’t all that odd. I’d much rather keep Commander Shepard behind cover while alien weaponry inexplicably bounces off metal crates instead of going to a foreign country myself with little more than a submachine gun and a prayer book. Escapism is a way to experience these situations ourselves from the safety of our couches. I think it’s important to remember, however, that there are those who do end up in these situations who do so without the benefit of save points, an omniscient support character or a controller to stand between them and the events taking place. And the moments when they overcome the obstacles set before them is an event much more worthy of celebration than any achievement we might unlock on our consoles or PCs.
Remember Captain Pendragon? I’ve been making an effort to keep in touch with Polymancer Studios on the work but so far the efforts have been fruitless. I still think the work is viable and, looking back on it now, could use some tweaking or perhaps even expansion and clarifying.
Since I will unfortunately be missing out on VACATION HELL due to saving the work-in-progress to the wrong place yesterday (I blame the old cheese, long story) my mind has turned to other projects. The pitch is still in need of polish before shooting off to Query Shark, I have a D&D campaign to plan, Alchemist At Sea is kicking around in my head especially now that I’m reading more George RR Martin, and I have until the 29th to figure out if I really have the time, material and gumption to give IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! the video treatment for the Escapist’s competition this year.
But what of Captain Pendragon? It’s a fun little escapist romp (bit of a segue, see what I did there?) that isn’t difficult to write and should have a broad audience appeal – steampunk, adventure, post-apocalyptic, characterization, etc – yet I hesitate to move forward with anything related to it given it’s current limbo status. I’ve sent a final missive to Polymancer pursuant to publishing the first little bit of it, but since I haven’t seen anything with their signature on it, the rights are still technically mine.
So do I wait to hear from them? Or do I move forward?
Do I take it as-is to Duotrope? Find time to edit & expand it to make it better? Perhaps even lengthen it to novella-size and toss it up on PubIt?
Give me your thoughts, Internets. I’m feeling a little lost here.
Now that I’ve finally completed the last round of edits for Citizen in the Wilds short of anything that comes from test reads, I can turn my attention to other projects. I have a few on my plate but first and foremost is a deadline approaching with all of the inevitablity of a steam locomotive with a beard in place of its cow-catcher.
It needs to be horror and it needs to be set in or about a vacation. That’s about all we have to go on, other than the word count. So how do we begin. What sort of horror do we invoke?
I’ve done the horror thing before and met with moderate success. But I don’t want to rely as much as the supernatural I did in my previous work. Buckets of blood and disgusting monsters doesn’t necessarily make something a horror story. What does, then?
Once again, I direct your attention to the excellent and insightful Extra Credits:
Horror is about human psychology. It’s about understanding those primal fears that have tormented mankind since its early history. Horror is about the irrational and the breakdown of our modern faith in logic and the fundamental order of the world. Horror is about all those things that drive us towards our darker impulses and justify our most bestial actions. Horror is about hopelessness, and facing things so unimaginably greater than ourselves that, for all of our self-importance and assurance of our place in the world, we’re nothing before them.
To me, this is very nearly an outline of the major points a good horror story needs to touch upon to be a true member of that genre. If you rely on jump-out scares or grotesqueness, you’re missing the point. Shock is not the same as horror. Shock fades after a few moments. Horror fucks with your head.
Here’s an example. Villains do things for deeply personal reasons. Those reasons do not necessarily need to be explained to the audience. If you want to make your villain terrifying, regardless of what genre you’re in, keeping their motivations inscrutable even as we get to view their personality can introduce an element of horror into the story. Lay their motivations bare, however, or attempt to obfuscate their drives behind quirky logic or language and you’ll undermine the sentiment of dread you wish to convey. I’m lookin’ at you, Mass Effect.
Give me more examples of true horror as opposed to failures. When have you been shocked, compared to when you’ve been deeply disturbed? These are the sort of things I’ll be contemplating over the next week as I frame this story. I have an idea, and ways to make it interesting, but making sure it fits into the horror genre as a whole instead of just playing with the occasional scare will be the real challenge.
