Shameless Banter

Every Day Fiction has published my story, Show Me Brave, today.

It's a direction I don't normally take with a story.  It's pretty tame for something out of my mind.  I'm curious to see how people react to it.  Fortunately, since EDF is super-cool enough to allow comments on stories, I'll get to see just how they react.  I LOVE that.

Please stop on by and have a read.  Five minutes of almost romance...  And if you do, please let me know what you think of it.

Have a great day.

I'm so bad at posting stuff in any sort of journal.

Part of it is not having any time.  In fact, that's all of it.  I'd totally take the time to write down my thoughts and such if I had it.  Instead, I have children, and a career I'm trying to get off the ground.

In a few years, I'm certain I'll be selling my nonfiction book, "World Building and Housekeeping" to hundreds of stay-at-home writers with children.  I'll be an expert on the subject.

I can write flash, and I can write a short story, on the days when I have an afternoon, but this "building a world from the solar-system up for the latest novel burning in my mind while I take care of kids and house" thing is Crrrrraaaaazy.  Hard to keep your mind on grocery lists and grilled cheese, when you're planning the governmental skeleton of a far-future world in your head all day.  Hard to build a world with potty-training, dinner-cooking, and dishes going on around you, too.

So imagine how much time I get to do THIS.

But, after wandering through the Table of Contents for this month's line-up at Every Day Fiction, I felt like I had to say something.  There's so many writers out there keeping up with blogs and journals, and bein' cool, and interesting and stuff.

EDF is running my story, Show Me Brave, on the sixth of this month.  It's not like most things I write, but I like it okay.  Please check it out, if you've inclination.

Have great days.

Many thanks to  Jennifer Brozek  (gaaneden) and The Edge of Propinquity for publishing my latest story offered to the public.  Cats and Dogs and Maybe a Pig is live for the month at their ezine.  

It makes me happy.

Ack.  Lawyers. 

  I don't usually do this--write when my fingers are still numb from sleep and my brain is only just soaking in coffee.  It doesn't usually snow here and it's tumbling down outside right now.  And it's usually not my birthday, but today it is.

So I'm starting this Live Journal thang while my thoughts are still floating about the room and falling on me like that strange snow out there.  I wanted to start this on my birthday, right at the beginning of my new nine year cycle.  I figured I might as well see what came out first thing today.

You don't know me, but it's my birthday.  This is a good one, too.  I can feel it already.  Finally.

I'm thirty-seven today.  I remember when I turned thirty.  I thought life was over.  I actually cried about it.  What a dumb kid I was.

This LJ...  I have other blogs.  I rarely write in them.  I used to, but I don't have a lot of time for them anymore.  I've been devoting more time to writing stories instead.  Thankfully, that's been a wise decision.  My writing is selling.  In my wildest hopes, this journal will be a place to talk about my writing career.  In self-wisdom, I have to say it'll probably be a mixed-up mash of whatever the hell I manage to say whenever I get a chance to say it.  (Just like this first entry.)

Reflections of who I am:

I'm coming into an understanding about my chosen craft:

1. Writers are everywhere.  Read anything from any editor today--hundreds and hundreds of people send stories to publisher after publisher every day.  The mythic "Slush Pile" rises in any serious writer's mind like an obelisk of tattered papers--wind-ruffed and ink-brushed, towering against the uncomfortable sky, billions of words written by contemporaries and competition.

2. It takes something really, really special (not only gorgeously written, but amazingly assembled)  to rise above the crowd of typers out there and grab the mind of the Reader.

3. There ARE new stories.  Right, there's the ol', "There's only one story--the story of Life", and the idea that there are only two or three stories told, and billions of retellings.  That's all bullshit.  Imagination is boundless.  Not everything has been said.  There is all the room in the universe for invention.  I'll prove it to you.

4. Writing is a J-O-B.  You have to start at the bottom and work your way up.  Unless you're extremely lucky and meet the right person at the right time.  Otherwise, you have to have your introductions made.  Sometimes planned.  I wrote a novel four or five years ago.  It's a great big thing, full of observation and comment.  I actually wrote to editors and called it "Candide meets Star Wars".  I love it, don't get me wrong, but I think that if I were the editor of a big name publishing house and I ran across that cover letter in my towering pile of slush from some young upstart out there in Nowhereland who thinks he's George Lucas and Fucking Voltaire with Humanity's Next Great Story following his amateur, page-long "query" letter that doesn't say a damn thing that it should, and everything it should not--I'd probably hunt the little fucker down and kick his ass for wasting a tree.

   a.  I cringe everytime I think about being so young and dumb when I was introduced to the Right person at the very Wrong time.  Years ago I met an author who'd just been featured on Oprah's Book Club.  Her mom worked with my wife.  She actually hooked me up with her agent, who works for a big, big name agency.  I presented the beginning of my novel ("finished" for a couple of months) to the agent--with an introduction from  her freakin' Oprah's Book Club client!!!!!--which I should never have done.  It wasn't ready, for one thing, and for another, it was nothing the agent would ever represent.  I am not her style at all.  And I knew it.  I read my acquaintance's novel.  Historical Literature--gorgeous stuff.  I should have asked the agent to pass it down the hall instead, to someone who worked with science fiction and fantasy, and political ya-yas and all that crazy jazz that my book is all about.  Esecially after she told me how much she liked the writing.  But I didn't.  Then I lost contact with all of those people.  Stupid.

5. I'm pretty good at what I do, but I can and will get better.  This is good to know.  Really, there's lots of people out there who think they're the best at writing, and they're not.  It took a long time for me to be objective about my own writing.  To stop thinking of it as completed artwork once that last word was out there.  I've learned to go at my stories with an axe.  I write, wait, and hack it to bits.  Whole new stories are born that way.  Not only that, but quality writing.  Kill your art.  Turn it inside out, and you've got an idea of what people want to read.  If you want to sell it, it's not yours anymore, stop treating it like it is.  Do what the editor wants.  Listen to the people who hate it, and why they do.  My aforementioned novel gets rewritten this coming year--so that it will sell.  I'll always be learning as long as I'm writing.

6. I might not get rich as a writer.  But I might.  At any rate, I can and will make a living at it.  There's so much to do out there.

7. Peanut butter and chocolate were made for each other.  If I ever time-travel, I want to take peanut butter to the Aztecs.   And show them paintings of Conquistadors and tell them to watch out.


Oh man, there's so much more I'm learning about being a real live writer, and many more reflections on who I am, but like I said, it's early and this is my first post.  I don't want to scare you all away too quickly.  If you're at all interested,come back soon, or be my friend, or whatever we do around here in LJ.  I'll probably write more soon, this was fun.  Maybe I'll figure out something entertaining to do--like a weekly somethingorother.

Here I am.  You don't know me, but it's my birthday.