Author: Don

My Branding Motto

I see lots of Twitter discussions and blog entries on the importance of social networking and branding for writers. I have my share of sites (just look at my sidebar), and have given some thought to what my “brand” might be (or should be), so I certainly don’t knock the idea.  

Yes, publishing’s moving. Yes, a writer (any artist, really) should be online somehow. But, how much time and energy do I spend doing this?  Where do I spend it?  More importantly, what about the writing?  Makes me wonder if I have to be Don Draper to figure this all out.

Alan DeNiro (author of one of my favorite short story collections, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead) has also tried to ponder these mysteries, partially spurred on by a presentation at SXSWi, at which the assertion was made that…

An author is no longer an individual working in a room alone, but the leader of an online “tribe” of followers –- the people who comprise the author’s audience. Several example kept coming up, wine guy Gary Vaynerchuck, author of Crush It!, business guru Seth Godin; and Kroszer’s favorite example, The Pioneer Woman, who “could organize a tour on her own without the help of a publisher.” The consensus, from another panel –- “Scoring a Tech Book Deal” was that a potential author needed a minimum of 5,000 Twitter followers.

Now, I have no intention of being John the Baptist in sackcloth and ashes, crying out in the wilderness.  I’m not going to rail about art vs. commerce.  I’m just saying that as I look at my “writers” list on Twitter and the Google Friendconnect bloggers I’m following on the sidebar–which accounts for only a third of the writer blogs I follow on my RSS feed reader–I see exactly the tribalism that’s being talked about.  Book and story reviewing, writers of every level interviewing other writers of every level, guest blogging, group blogging — and I honestly have no idea where I fit in yet.

Until I figure it out, though, I feel I’m doing two things absolutely right…

  • I’m writing what I want to write, and I’m putting it out there.
  • I’m connecting with “the right people.”

Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Joel Hodgson said his crew was never worried if not everyone would get their arcane references, because “the right people will get it.”  Who are “the right people?”

First, I’ll talk about how I collect them. I collect them the way I collect comic books after the 90s when people realized they just didn’t need 8 variant covers of the same damn first issue of every book with an X in the title.  I invest in the books I want to read.  The ones that interest me.  Same with the folks I follow on any given social network I belong to.  I follow them ‘cos I want to.  Because they pique my curiousity, or enthrall me with their points of view, or they’re doing exactly what I want to be doing, the way I hope to do it.  And, I strive to be equally interesting to them.  And I accomplish this by putting myself out there, and responding the best I can to what these people put out there.

I read an interview with–well, I forget if it was Ricky Gervais or Eddie Izzard.  To paraphrase my favorite bit of that interview, I’d rather be 1000 people’s favorite writer than 10,000 people’s 10th favorite writer.  The way I see it, my chances of accomplishing that are better when I develop–okay, a tribe–of people who “get” me.

i.e. “The right people.”

I guess you could say my branding strategy so far can be best summed up in the poem “Motto” by Langston Hughes…

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That’s the reason
I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
         is:
Dig and be dug
In return.

Now, I did say “so far.”  So, tell me — am I missing anything?  What else should I be considering?  I want to hear especially from my peeps that have blogged about this in the past (don’t make me go back through all the Read items in Google Reader, pleeeease?).  Am I thinking too hard about all this?  Or not hard enough?

Educate me.

Hail to the King, Baby

Two songs and two thoughts went through my mind as I sat in this chair, getting this picture taken at a local winery.

I’ve got to keep my image while suspended on a throne
That looks out upon a kingdom filled with people all unknown
Who imagine I’m not human and my heart is made of stone
And I’ve never had no problems and my toliet’s trimmed with gold

Spencer Davis Group, “I’m a Man”

What that idiotic smirk on my face doesn’t show is the inner realization that if those lyrics resonated with even the smallest part of me, then I have only myself to blame.  If I do portray this image, it’s because I’ve developed a Game Face.  I wondered if the Game Face may be part of some psychological defense mechanism that may or may not be needed anymore.  I wondered if maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance that my life might be better off without it.

But then, I remembered the words to another song…

I was the king of the world
I had every thing thrown at me,
That the judge and jury could hurl
I was the man of the hour
I would claw and scratch my way up,
To the very top of the tower

-Toto, “King of the World”

Then I realized there were reasons I was the way I am.  No, I haven’t been severely traumatized or anything, at least no more so than your average Joe.  But somewhere along the way, I decided the Game Face became a handy tool for helping me get back up whenever I was knocked down.  I decided that maybe it was the price of doing business in life.  I decided that it wasn’t making me hard or calloused in the way people don’t like – the way that makes you slow, closed-off, and numb.  I decided that it made me stronger – like a fighter who’s not only conditioned to take a hit and get back up, but is willing to step back into the ring and tell the next chump (read: bit of disappointment) who wants a piece, “Come get some.”

I decided it’s good to be the king.

Tough Love

Been awhile since I’ve attended the literary vivisection that is my biweekly critique group with something to read.  This week, I brought in a 996-word flash fiction piece, written to a story prompt I found online–sorry, but due to the rules of the forum, I can’t post the prompt here.

Anyway, here’s what the gang had to say…

FTW!

  • I was unsatisfied with the working title I gave the story, but at least one reader thought it fit just fine.
  • As usual, at least one reader called my story “intriguing.”
  • People liked my description of “bad college behavior,” especially in regard to one peculiar substance.

StoryFail

  • That certain peculiar substance didn’t click as much for a couple of readers as much as for the rest.  They understood how I used it; just didn’t resonate, it seemed.
  • Only one reader out of eight seemed completely satisfied with how I ended the piece.  Most, even those who understood the implications, still thought the ending could’ve been “stronger” or “more clever.”

A short critique for a short piece.  Sometimes, though, I don’t feel I deserve the praise I sometimes get for my flash.  Flash seems to cover a multitude of sins, where my writing is concerned.  It makes sense–the more I write, the more that can go wrong.  But sometimes, I feel like the success–or lack thereof–of my longer pieces is more representative of my current abilities. Oh, well…

Getting Things Done, For Longer Than I’ve Been Alive

Jim Lehrer, host of the PBS NewsHour (formerly known as, among other things, The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour) for over 35 years, is one of my biggest writing influences. During his long and storied career in journalism, he’s written and published nineteen novels. This makes him one of my writing heroes, despite the fact that I haven’t read word one of his books.

So what makes him my influence? He wrote those books while he was anchoring, reporting in, and producing award-winning news shows. And he’s not some Johnny-Come-Lately who decided to “follow his real dream” once he got the NewsHour gig and after getting a bit of fame behind him. His first novel Viva, Max! was published in 1966, seven years before he teamed up with Robert MacNeil, at the beginning of a career that would garner him numerous awards for excellence in journalism.

Do a thought experiment with me. Lehrer’s books get fair-to-middlin’ reviews but let’s assume–purely for the sake of argument–that each and every one of his novels is utter crap (Again, I don’t know this, because I haven’t read any of them). Imagine how much work it would take to produce and publish nineteen bad novels, and you’ll see why I’m impressed.

In short, he’s a guy who gets his writing done, and in the interviews I’ve seen over the years in which he talks about his fiction, he gets it done anywhere and everywhere he can, every day.

I’ve met writers who hold down day jobs and/or are parents (some, of kids with special needs), and/or who are adult caregivers, and/or who are dealing with their own or someone else’s medical/mental/emotional problems. And I look at these folks, and at Jim Lehrer, and ask myself, “What the fuck excuse do I have?”

Does it make you ask the same?

Pants on Fire

So my friend Jess passed on the Bald-Faced Liar Creative Writer Award to this here blog. THANKS, JESS!! Not just for the award but for another fun game to play along with.

Here are the rules:

  1. Thank the person who gave this to you. (see above)
  2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog. (see above)
  3. Link to the person who nominated you. (see above)
  4. Tell up to six outrageous lies about yourself, and at least one outrageous truth. (see below)
  5. Nominate seven “Creative Writers” who might have fun coming up with outrageous lies.
  6. Post links to the seven blogs you nominate. (Umm… well…)
  7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know you nominated them. (Uh, yeah…)

Anyway, let’s start with the outrageous lies and the one outrageous truth. Can you guess which is which?

  1. Clevelanders are famous for lying about this, but I really was an extra in the parade scene in “A Christmas Story.” I was one of the folks standing right in front of Soldiers & Sailors Monument.
  2. I once got a standing ovation singing “Sweet Transvestite” at a karaoke bar, embarassing another singer the way Huey Lewis did in the film Duets.
  3. I lost my left big toe in a childhood bicycle mishap, finding out the hard way why there are always supposed to be guards around the chain.
  4. I made it through two rounds of interviews for The Real World: San Francisco. Yes, the one with Puck. So glad I dodged that bullet.
  5. Fourteen years ago, I embarassed myself backstage at a Chicago concert by telling the trumpet player, Lee Loughnane, that he was my idol and I wanted to be just like him.
  6. When I was twenty, I once slept with a girl who would eventually become an actress who, until recently, co-starred in a famous network TV police procedural drama. She’d originally planned to be an engineer. (No, I won’t tell you which show.)
  7. As I child, I had dreams of me being a sub in BDSM scenes before I even knew what BDSM was.

Anyway, the real truth is that while I occasionally break my rule of not spamming other people’s blogs, I’m a little wiped to think of seven folks who might be kind enough to play along. How about, I pick… you? I’d only ask one thing, which is that you leave a comment with a link if you do play along.

How Don Is About to Get His Groove Back

As I slogged through my horrendous backlog of Google Reader items last week, I read one of the best writing-related posts I’d ever seen from io9.com entitled “12 Secrets to Being a Super-Prolific Short-Story Writer.” I actually know some of these…

  1. Know how your story ends before you begin it.
  2. Don’t just write the same story over and over again, or you’ll bore yourself.
  3. Start crude, then work on refining.
  4. Have a bunch of stories on the back burner, and keep rotating.
  5. Don’t be afraid to stare at the blank screen for a few hours.
  6. Write a bunch of stories in a shared world.
  7. Some stories are just the turning point in the story, not the whole story from beginning to end.
  8. Try creating a character study, or a collection of potent images, instead of just a series of plot twists.
  9. If you’re getting bogged down in a particular story, you probably haven’t found what it’s about yet.
  10. Try an exercise, like rewriting a well-known story from a different viewpoint.
  11. Don’t be afraid to take crazy risks.
  12. Write for different markets.

It’s no secret to anyone that I’m weeks overdue on delivering my Four Horsemen Contest story, for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. But every inch of the teeth-pulling progress I’ve made on the damn thing thus far was made by re-learning these two pieces of advice.

5) Don’t be afraid to stare at the blank screen for a few hours. Sometimes you gotta spend some time chewing over the turning point in your story. Sometimes the ending you thought was so crystal clear when you started out has turned mushy. Sometimes you have to throw out a thousand words of perfectly good story because it rang false and didn’t feel like the direction the story should be going in. There’s no substitute, on occasion, for sitting and sweating it out. Think about the characters, and what they’re actually thinking and feeling in the situation you’ve set up. Think about the themes you’ve established and what sort of resolution they’re leading to. Take the time to visualize the right ending for this story, or put it aside…

I’ve seriously forgotten how to just sit and sweat it out. I’d sit and get frustrated that nothing was coming. I’d make myself scribble some words down. Then I’d hit the backspace key and delete. Then I’d hit Ctrl-Z and put it all back. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a life issue, really. I’ve never had any trouble bleeding, sweating, or crying to keep my momentum going. I’ve had stuff knock me down, and I’ve had to get back up. But when something just stalls? When I’m working and working, and I’m just spinning my wheels? That’s often when I want to give up.

But I’m getting better.

9) If you’re getting bogged down in a particular story, you probably haven’t found what it’s about yet. This is sort of an extension of tip #5, I guess. Maybe you’re trying to make your characters care about what you want them to care about, instead of what it makes sense for them to care about. Maybe you’re focusing on a supporting character, while your main character is wandering around just outside the frame. Maybe the real theme or idea of your story is something you’ve only touched on in passing. The power of storytelling is so great, that when you find what your story is actually about, you may feel it propelling you forward with its unstoppable logic. The characters will be motivated to move forward, the mysteries will feel more and more urgent until someone solves them, and the underlying themes will get clearer and clearer until they form into some kind of potent image. That’s the idea, anyway.

And, I’m almost there.

Part of the problem (and no, I don’t really count the hell my work life has been the past few weeks) is that my writing process has moved soooo far away from starting with an idea. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “First contact with mutual attraction between the species.” But I had a hell of a time starting with that because that idea, in itself, said nothing to me at first. Given the right germ of a scene, maybe a character interaction or a piece of dialogue, that idea might’ve occurred to me.

But, I’m not bitching! It took a bit of struggle, but I’ve actually found something resembling a theme, related to the “First contact with mutual attraction between the species” idea, that I can sink my teeth into, based on the characters and situations that have already presented themselves in the puke draft. And that’s what I’ve been working on, trying to hammer it into shape in the Forge of Vulcan (i.e. my netbook).

Yep, I can feel my groove coming back, slowly but surely.

Tough Love

Wow, last week was a shitty one for writing. I’m not making excuses. Just stating the plain fact that between the crazy shit going on at my dayjob and life in general, I just couldn’t pull the end of this story together like I’d planned. Of course, being fixated on the Australian Open didn’t help, either. What can I say, I’m a sucker for Grand Slam tennis, plus it was my escape from dayjob hell.

I did manage to pull together Act II of my story, and that’s what I brought to the biweekly crit group vivisection yesterday. Here’s what they said:

For the Win

  • This section was “intriguing.” (I get that a lot these days)
  • Good character details: e.g. being a member of MUFON; scene on the train ride in; what she wears to work
  • Apparently, the way I wrote a section showing “The Battle of the Moon” was 95% win, in terms of its description and most of the details of how my protagonist came upon it.

Story!Fail

  • Good question on one reader’s part: I never described wtf MUFON was.
  • I ended Act II with a confusing situation. Out of seven readers, only one verbalized what was going on, and even that was only a guess on his part.
  • One thing I apparently failed to fix from the last section I brought, my character still isn’t showing enough of her alleged skepticism. She’s still taking what’s told to her at face value.
  • The 5% of “Battle of the Moon” fail had to do with exactly how the MC stumbled onto it.

I probably will not be bringing Act III to group. I’m behind, not only in terms of my personal goal of finishing and sending off one new story per month, but because the deadline to submit this story as the opening salvo in my contest with the other Four Horsemen is today. I did get some plotting help from the other members of my crit group, and I already have one of my trusty beta-readers on what I already have. The plan is to finish this bitch and fire it out to the rest of my beta readers today or tomorrow. Okay, Wednesday. After all, Mercedes has already drawn steel.

Tough Love

It’s been way too long since I’ve had an example of my critique group’s biweekly vivisection of my writing (Holy shit–August? Really, Don?). If you’ll recall, the latter portion of 2009 was spent rewriting. But, one of my 2010 goals is to write a story a month, so I had to have something to bring this time around.

I brought Act I of the story that I hope will make people dance for me.

Here’s what the group had to say…

For the Win

  • One reader was drawn to the main character. She “loved her voice.”
  • Another liked the description of the internet communications between the main character and the supporting character–an alien.
  • A few readers liked the opening hook, which let them know what kind of story this was, and more importantly, what kind of story it wasn’t.
  • One commented on the “pop culture/sci-fi mix” I worked into the story. cf. the film Contact, except for the immediacy of the meeting between human and alien in my story.
  • Everyone thought one aspect of the story–which I’ll keep secret for now–was a really good device.
  • Overall, the story was called “fun” and most of my descriptions “good.”

Story!Fail

  • The main character had a bit of skepticism in her, which she should’ve shown during her first alien encounter…
  • In particular, one piece of evidence I invented for the alien to convince the MC that he was an alien wasn’t all that convincing (this is why I hate writing sci-fi ;)).
  • One reader had a different opinion of the way I wrote the initial internet communication between the MC and the alien (emails and chats). He saw what I was trying to do stylistically, but wondered why I just didn’t write the emails like emails, and the chats like straight up chats.
  • My description of the alien, while generally clear–except for the alien’s clothes–raised questions as to certain mechanics (especially regarding the aspect of it I need to keep secret right now :)).
  • There were some beats missing in the last scene of Act I–readers questioned the way things escalated between the MC and the alien.

I don’t mind telling you that the whole thing went a lot better than I thought it was going to go. I was able to come up with (what I believe to be) quick fixes for most of the problems the group pointed out to me. In the end, though, I’m glad the problems seemed to be in the details, rather than in any fundamental story flaw.

There’s a first time for everything, huh? 🙂

Up a Slipstream Without a Paddle

Because I’m perpetually behind on my blog-reading, I only just found out that the proprietor of Lobster and Canary is going to attend Arisia at Cambridge, MA, the largest sf/f convention in New England.

The items on L&C’s particular schedule are of particular interest…

  • Non-Standard Fantasy
  • The Undefended Borders of SF
  • Interstitial Fiction: Dancing Between Genres
  • Inherent Darkness of Fairy Tales
  • The City as Character
  • Myth and Folklore in Fantasy

Of course, Daniel is scheduled to read as well, but I wanted to focus on the panels listed (I assume they’re panels).

(Oh, and yes, Calista — I now regret not coming and will plan to come out next year.) 🙂

Anyway, picture the sort of fiction that comes to mind when you hear those topics–love it or hate it–and you’ll have a good idea of the sort of stuff I aim to write. Aim, and still fall quite short of the mark. Still, unless the “please feel free to send us more” is part of certain markets’ form rejections, I remain hopeful. In any case, it brought to mind a conversation I had yesterday which dislodged a memory of a blog post from writer Steven Barnes…

You should read ten times as much as you intend to write. Want to write 1000 words a day? Read 10,000 words. Furthermore, this reading should be BETTER than your current ability, and BETTER than your intended goal, if possible. Want to write comic books? Read pulp fiction. Write pulp fiction? Read popular fiction. Write popular fiction, read bestsellers. Write bestsellers? Read classics.

And you want to write classics? Well…pick your grandparents very carefully.

I’ve internalized this advice to the point where it actually took me a second to remember where it came from. But it begs the question, what do I read that’s “better” than my intended goal if I want to write what I say I want to write?

Now, I’ve done or am doing most of the “required reading” — Feeling Very Strange, Interfictions and Interfictions 2, Conjunctions 39 and 52, Tin House 33, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, (edited to add:) Trampoline, and most of the individual short story collections published by Small Beer Press, and others. But there are times when I feel like I’m being shown how to do the breaststroke before being taught how to properly do a front crawl. Don’t know where the swimming analogy came from, but it’s as good as any.

And I guess the main reason I’m thinking about all of this–assuming it’s not a symptom of the Andromeda Strain I’ve been fighting off the past few days–is that I seem to be feeling a bit of existential angst about my writing. I don’t even care about, Will this pay off in the end, or not? I care more about, Am I doing this right or just spinning my wheels? Are my goals reasonable? What am I doing as a writer?

Also, Who the hell am I as a writer, anyway?

Motion in Poetry

Last Sunday night, I attended a poetry workshop by the current Broome County (NY) Poet Laureate, Andrei Guruianu at Buffalo St. Books. He did a reading from a few of his collections, including his latest, and nothing was sacred anymore, and then guided willing attendees through an exercise.

Guruianu did a brief lecture on poetic elements, which was very useful. Up until now, I had no criteria for judging any piece of poetry other than, “I know what I like.” And Guruianu’s words about the elements of what he considers to be good poetry gave me at least one way to evaluate the poetry I read from now on. To him, the best poetry uses words to depict an environment or invoke images that are concrete, significant, meaningful, and which resist the mind’s tendency to go off on tangents and lean toward abstractions.

Afterward, I went back through the five or six books that I laughingly call my “poetry library” and I’ll be damned if I didn’t go back to the ones listed as my favorites and found just that. Not one poem about “war” or “time” or “space” or “that girl who broke my heart.” Poems on those sorts of topics, yes. But not about the abstract concepts.

And of course, I went back through what I laughingly call the “poems” I’ve written thus far. Now, I knew most of them sucked, but now I know at least one reason why! And the few (well, one… okay two or three) that “worked,” did so because they generally had more concrete elements.

So, to answer the questions that are undoubtedly on your mind…

  1. Yes–I’d like to write more poetry. Maybe see if I can salvage the stuff I’ve written so far. Maybe write something like the work I heard at the poetry panel I attended at Astronomicon 11.
  2. No–I’m not posting any of it here. Maybe at Fictionaut, but even then probably not for public consumption. Because I care for you all, far too much. Maybe once I’ve learned a few more things.