Heavy Lies the Burden

Most of the time, writing is like pulling your own teeth out with a pair of tweezers. The words themselves may come easy (they mostly always have for me), but the story, that thing behind the words that’s what most people actually care about, lurks there, at the bottom of the socket, hiding amongst identically-shaped fragments that constitute the various distractions and wrong turns every writer knows all too intimately and which the reader rarely sees but can only intuit the existence of.

But sometimes, blessed be, your creative subconscious will just upload a whole story into your brain, fully-formed and ready to be written; all you have to do is get to it fast enough to get it on paper (or screen) before it fades into the mist. Before a couple of nights ago, that had only happened to me once. Now it’s happened twice.

It was on the way home from World Fantasy Con Continue reading “Heavy Lies the Burden” →

World Fantasy Con

Is on. Not that I have a membership; I am not that cool (or is it that I am too cool? I can never decide which; probably the former). But I will be there, in the hotel, with friend and Clarion classmate Greg Bossert, attending the Bar Con and buying drinks for interesting people. I figure I’ll know enough people there to get started, and a friend of mine who’s an editor and has been in the biz end of things for years has promised to make Useful Introductions. I’m looking forward to it, not only for the hobbing of nobs and working of nets, but also because I’ll get to see some friends I don’t get to see much (hi Jessica!), revisit Mysterious Galaxy, and maybe even catch a few rays by the pool.

I’m not a big con-goer (or seeker of crowds in any situation), but I’m excited to go to this one, as I’m told it tends to be denser with writers and other industry folks, and a little lighter on fans. Not that I don’t have love for the fans–they are my people, after all–but the crush of daily life has been much upon me these last weeks, and I have neglected both my writing practice and regularly socializing with other writers, which deficits’ catching-up-with I hope to jump-start at WFC. Continue reading “World Fantasy Con” →

Notes on the Temporary Hiatus, or What I’ve Been Up To in the World Outside My Head

To those concerned that I have fallen off the face of the Earth, or just stopped posting new updates to the Victorius Revolution, fear not. True, it has been some weeks since the last episode updated, but do not despair. There will be more, and soon. It is just that I have been overengaged in the going to places and the doing of things and have suffered a lack of available time and mental bandwidth for the crafting of fiction, which period of overengagement seems (hopefully) to be coming to an end. Continue reading “Notes on the Temporary Hiatus, or What I’ve Been Up To in the World Outside My Head” →

Small Episodes

Something I’ve noticed in the long-form fiction I’ve been writing lately is that my stories do not fall readily into the traditional chapter breaks one might normally expect in genre fiction. Maybe it’s all the lit-fic I’ve read over the years, but I find what works best for me, structurally, is something akin to what Roberto Bolaño did with 2666, which is to break the story up into large sections which themselves are broken into much smaller pieces (generally 500-2500 words, at least in my case), which flow more or less continuously on into one another. Continue reading “Small Episodes” →

Moving Right Along (Updated)

Despite the continuing challenges to my schedule-making skillz, I have managed to make some progress on the Victorius Revolution, though not, of course, as much as I would have liked. On the plus side, I think I’ve got a fair bit of time I can devote to it in the coming days, so that’s good.

In terms of the story itself, I’ve got parts one and two loosely plotted out (one on actual paper, one in electronic notes; I keep intending to centralize, but when I actually have time to work on the story I’m usually pretty keen on just kicking out prose). It helps me to know where I’m going when I’m writing, otherwise my fiction turns into a game of existential Grand Theft Auto, and my characters just wander around wondering to themselves what they’re doing. Continue reading “Moving Right Along (Updated)” →