I’ve noticed lately that the authors that I really enjoy reading are old. Not just old, but gray-beard, pot-bellied, been-around-the-block-more-times-than-(you get the point) old. Just take a look at a picture of George R. R. Martin. He’s old. Really old. He’s been writing like forever. Robert Jordan, old. Mike Stackpole: He’s getting there. Tad Williams: Well, okay, but he’s still been out there and writing for a very long time.

Even the long dead authors were old when they were in the prime of their writing career. Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, the list goes on and on.

My point is that the writers don’t just sit and knock out a best seller out of the box. Most of these guys have been at it and honing their skills for a very long time. They’ve paid their dues, they’ve learned the business, they changed when the times called for change.

Then I look at myself. I’m not old by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been writing on and off for the better part of 25 years, but nothing that I’d call consistent until this year. Yes, I’ve gotten a lot of words down over the years, but I could have written so much more. If I had written just a little every day over those 25 years I’d be much further along than I am.

My early writing was just what you’d expect from an early writer. It was fast-paced, choppy, and not really that good. I’m not saying that everyone writes bad straight out of the gate, but as a general rule the younger you are the less critical you are of your own work. Heck, there are some people that’ve been around for a good long time that need to take a look at what they’re producing with a more critical eye.

With each story or book I completed I got a little bit better at telling a story. But that’s going to happen to anyone who sits and writes and gets stories out. There are some other things that I’ve learned over the years. One is a great amount of patience. I didn’t used to be as patient and I would write, quick edit, send out. Now I know that a story needs to marinate for a while before I do a thorough edit. Before I send it to beta readers and get feedback and line edits. Then I’ll send it to a market and hope for the best or I’ll self publish the work because it’s a re-edit and reprint or I just don’t feel it fits a given market. Yes I’ve had choices, and making the right choice for a given piece has been critical to that piece finding an audience.

Back to maturity, this is something I’ve had to work on. Having a level head and understanding that just because I want it now and self-publishing (Indie publishing if you like) is a choice that must be made with a level head and not something to just jump into. I self-pubed Astel: Chosen because I thought it would be the right choice for that work. I’d shopped it around, gotten some good feedback, and decided to put it out there. I know now that I should have done a better job with the editing of that work and I can still do that, but for now I have other works I’m concentrating on. Before I self-publish another novel I will be hitting Astel hard with edits so that it’s a stronger work. That’s the joy and benefit of putting out a ebook.

But I can sit and look at these options because I’ve experienced enough of the publishing end to know what I’m doing out there. Do I know everything? I ask this a lot and each time I laugh.

Yes, I’ve learned a lot over the years and each time I look at what I’m doing I learn a little more. I see people do things that go horribly wrong and I make a mental note not to be that person. Want an example? My Story Emperor’s Fist got a review that I would consider not as good as I was hoping for. Yes, I’ve seen glowing reviews for this little steam punk effort that I did for Tee and Pip. They were delighted by the story, put on a great cover, got the work out there. And the review wasn’t impressed. Hey, this happens. Not everyone is going to like what I do. It was called (I’m paraphrasing here) unoriginal and not what they’d come to expect from the penny deadfuls. I was a little hurt in that I thought I had done something that none of the stories had done. I’d gone places they hadn’t gone.

Did I get involved with the reviewer? No! Did I want more feedback about what didn’t work on this story? Well of course I did, but one thing an author needs to be able to do is separate themselves from their reviewers. It’s not my place to shoot down a review even if I disagree. That’s maturity in that you need to be able to not react to something that you’re not happy about. Maturity to keep going in the direction you’re going and know that the right people will find your work and enjoy it. Maturity to accept and move on.

This also adds to your experience. Until you experience this you’ll never know what I’m talking about. I’ve gotten bad reviews for Astel as well. Mostly for the editing, not the story, but still poor reviews. These hurt and I know that I should have done a better job with getting the book edited. I need to learn from that, do what I can about it, and move on. There’s a lot of words that need to be written and if I’m immature and reactionary and don’t learn from these lessons, I’ll never become a better writer. What I will become is a self-serving, excuse-making, bad author.

You can be young and experience a lot. You can be mature beyond your years. It will still take time to get to your overall goal. For someone like me, it’s taken years to get a level head to the point where I know what I want and I’m taking the correct steps to get there. I’m no longer wallowing in self-pity because I keep getting rejections and I’m having a hard time getting people to read my work. I’ve learned from my tantrums, from my rejections, from my missteps.

It took me a long time to learn these lessons and grow from them. Too long. It’s put me far behind where I should be. But that hasn’t detered me. As I said in the start of this. Most authors that I enjoy are far older than I am and have been only writing for a couple of decades. If I can get a start now then I’ll be in good shape to have a long writing career and I can be one of those pot-bellied, gray-bearded writers that people enjoy reading.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

I will never be the world’s strongest man. I will never be the richest. I will never be the smartest, tallest, fastest. I will never be the world’s greatest writer.

All of these have one thing in common. They’re all true. The last is the only in the list that is subjective and some people may (some day) think it is true.

I can become stronger by lifting weights and working out. I can become faster by running. I can earn more money by learning more and working toward a better paying job or starting my own business. I can become smarter by reading, taking courses, and reading. I’ll never be taller (maybe I should have left that example out)

I can become a better writer. By writing. With all of these examples (okay, okay, most of these examples) there are measurable ways to note your progress. You lift more weight, you reduce the amount of time it takes you to run a distance, you have more money. When it comes to writing there really isn’t a way to measure your success.

Oh, sure, you can look at number of publications, number of books published, size of advances, but does any of that mean you’re a better writer? I’ve read a lot of people I would consider famous authors and I can’t stand their work for some reason or another. Perhaps it’s their style, or I don’t like the content, or something they’ve written that throws me out of the story. Perhaps it just plain bad writing.

I always look at what others have done and wonder how I could have done it differently. I don’t mean better, I just mean differently. If someone got published by a major publisher or printed in a major magazine, someone liked what that author wrote. Someone thought it to be good enough to pay the person for their words. If I don’t like it, it’s on me, not on the publisher, right? Not everyone liked the ending of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I thought it was brilliant. I absolutely hated the ending of Under The Dome. Others loved it. Two books, one author, two different reactions. Like I said, I look to see what I would have done differently, not better.

I don’t fancy myself a master wordsmith. Hopefully I’m entertaining and people enjoy what I write, but I don’t think of myself as someone who’ll one day be so rich I can just sit and decide which masterpiece I’ll carve out on a given day. Even if I do find myself as a full-time writer, I’ll still need to churn out words to make a paycheck and keep money coming it. It won’t last forever. At least that’s what I tell myself. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it does. Most likely I’ll have to maintain a day job and have a side-job as a writer. That’s more the reality I’m looking at.

That doesn’t mean I think I’m a bad writer either. As with any of the above examples, strength, speed, financial gains, they’re all obtainable to a certain level if you work hard at them every day. You can’t run ten miles one day then rest for a month and think you’ll be better the next time you run. You can lift 250 pounds once and think you’re done. You can’t earn a million dollars and… okay, maybe that’s a bad example as well. My point is that you need to work at getting better at whatever you’re doing in order to actually get better.

I spent ten years working on one book. I didn’t commit to it fully at any time. I would write a little here, write a little there. Piece things together. It was, for the most part, a mess. I left it. I abandoned my child and moved on to other works. I wrote fast, I write aggressively, I wrote consistently for a good length of time. I know I got better. My writing actually improved and over the course of a couple of years I wrote several more books and a good number of short stories.

I stopped writing. It’s no surprise that I had to re-learn much of what I’d already learned. I had to take steps to build my skill back up and to improve the confidence I had in my writing. At no time did I ever think it was going to be easy because it’s not. It’s taken a lot of hours over a lot of days. Writing daily has helped me get to where I am faster than all those years I spent dabbling with my writing. Sure, I could stop and come back to it a few weeks later, but I’ll lose my momentum. I’ll be taking vacations later this year. I’m far enough ahead of my annual goal that I’m not afraid of missing that goal. I know I’ll hit my 450,000 word target. I’ll likely surpass it. All because I’m writing daily.

I’m not just getting better, but I’m getting faster. By sitting every day and writing and typing for a hour here, an hour there, I’ve gotten much faster at sitting and getting words down. There’s no reason to wait to start. I set my in the middle of December and started writing that day. I didn’t wait for January 1st to get going, I got going as soon as I decided I wanted to be serious about writing. You need to do the same thing. Get better, get faster, and start now! Don’t wait for tomorrow. Don’t wait until you feel like you’re organized and ready to go, just get going. There are so many tools available to help you writing that you just need to open one. Notepad, textpad, google docs, wordpad, word, scrivener, there are so many tools, just pick one and go.

I didn’t build a mountain of words by waiting. I built them by sitting and writing. As I said at the start, I’m not the best writer in the world, but I’ve been improving because I’ve been doing this daily for 159 days. I’ve added to my word count each and every day. It’s difficult to get going, but it’s also difficult to get a train moving. Once it’s on a roll, it’s hard to stop. You need to be that train. You need to get yourself started. The only way you’ll get better is to sit down daily and write. I cannot stress that enough.

Ignore me. Stop reading this right now and go and write.

GO!

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

There are days when I don’t want to write. Sure, I usually want to write, but sometimes I just don’t feel the magic. My brain doesn’t want to allow the words to come out. It’s difficult. I have headache. My dog is sick. My favorite daughter has practice. I’m tired. My sinuses are bothering me.

There are a lot of times when I just do not want to sit down and write.

I want to be a writer. I know the joy of having written something and thoroughly enjoyed writing it and others get a joy from reading it. I know that if I sit and get some words written, I’ll be that much closer to getting that story or that book done. It’s just a matter of sitting down day after day and getting it done. There is no replacement for persistence.

I used to be what’s known as a ‘burst’ writer. That means I used to be able to find a free couple of hours and just bash something out fast and furious. I could finish a short story in a day or two. Give me enough time and I could get a lot of work done. I didn’t see the need for sitting down every day because I didn’t want to write every day.

All that changed this year. I set a goal to write each and every day. Not just once a day, but whenever I had time to write, I would write. I set a goal for how many words I wanted to get written for the year. 450,000 sounded like a far more words than I would write in a year, so I decided to include blog posts in there as well. I honestly thought that I would write a lot more words for blog posts than I would for writing fiction.

I was right, but I was off. I’ve written only a few thousand more words as blog posts than I did for writing fiction. Well what does that mean? It means that I’ve written just slightly more than half my annual goal as blog posts which include daily updates, Unorthodox Writing Tips, Movie Reviews, Book Reviews. The other half is fiction words.

Remember my overall objective here. I want to be a writer. If you’ve done any study, more writers don’t earn a lot of money. That means they still need to keep their writing skills sharp in other areas. Like writing reviews and essays. Writing books is good, writing articles will bring in a little more money. Writing reviews will as well. People will pay for words if they feel those words are worth publishing.

So do I feel bad that I’ve only written half my goal as fiction? Pfft. Silly reader. I’m writing. That’s the whole point. I’m learning to sit, write, finish. I’m also learning to sit and write whenever I need to not just when the mood strikes me. I’m learning to type faster to I can make better use of that time when I have it available. Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time writing things that are making me no money and will likely never make me any money, but I’m practicing. I’m getting better at sitting and going. I’m getting better at getting distracted by something and jumping right back in.

I will never be able to say this enough. If you’ve followed me throughout my journey so far this year, you know I’ve written every day. I’ve blogged every day. I’ve written when it’s raining. I’ve written when it’s sunny. I’ve written when my sinuses feel like they’re crushing my brain. I’ve written after cleaning up after one of the dogs gets sick. I’ve written when it’s easy and the words flow like they’ve come from some magical realm and I’ve written when each word felt like I had to etch it in stone.

You need to write to be a writer. You need to write every day to become a better writer. Don’t just assume that words will happen when they happen. Those days are few and far between. There’s nothing like sitting down day after day, hitting the keys, and watching words appear. They won’t always be the best you can do, but it’ll add to that total word count. At the end you’ll see progress. You’ll feel better. You may even feel the need to write more words just because you now feel good about having written in the first place.

A writer is his/her own worst enemy. You will be able to come up with many excuses not to write. Turn that around and start coming up with excuses to write. Don’t let yourself get in your way. Write. Daily. Even when it hurts.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

Can I be honest with you? You won’t think less of me after I tell you this, will you? I’ve got one simple thing to say.

My writing sucks.

No, seriously. It’s awful. It’s been rejected time and again by publishers, agents, and editors big and small alike. It’s been turned down time and again. I’ve gotten a lot of rejection letters to prove that my writing is awful. Oh, sure I’ve had a couple published, but that doesn’t mean it’s all good. For the most part what I write is terrible.

Isn’t that what it means?

Remember what I posted last time? Quantity produces Quality. This little quote by Ray Bradbury should still be in your head. It should be branded onto your brain. You should understand what these three little words mean to you, me, and any writer out there. Can you have quality without quantity? Well sure, but if you produce a large amount of work, quality will happen if you want it to or not.

Many people work hard on one thing for a very long time. I did that. I spent nearly 12 years working on my first book. It sucked beyond compare. Even after many starts, stops, re-writes, edits, friends reading it and suggesting things. No matter what I did with that one piece, it still sucked. Oh, sure, there were parts in there that I liked and worked for the story’s betterment, but overall it was a big turd.

Then I wrote something else. And another thing. Then I worked on two things at the same time. I wrote even more works and I kept going writing more and more. I could see my work improving and I started sending out novels and short stories. I sent them where ever I could. I got a lot of rejections. Some day I’ll go back and add them up, but I knew rejection was part of the process. I tried to let it roll off me, but rejection sucks and a lot of rejection sucks even more.

Know who else got rejections? Ray Bradbury. He got rejected 499 times before he got a publication on his 500th try. Stephen King had a nail he would push rejection letters onto and then he’d go back to writing his next story. Tobias Buckell recently posted about his rejection counts (I admire his tracking ability and wish I had done the same when I had started doing this writing business). Even Scott Sigler suffered the rejection merry-go-round of write, submit, get rejected, submit somewhere else.

You’ve been told this before and you’ll hear it again and again: No one is an overnight success. I’ve said many times, writing is hard work. It takes a lot of perseverance. It takes a level of commitment most are not capable of. It requires you to grow a thick skin and continue pushing your work out there in the face of rejection, bad reviews, and more rejection. Your writing sucks. My writing sucks. Everyone has writing that sucks at some point.

But you can never make it better if you don’t write it. You need to start some where and you need to start some time. You can’t just let the fact that your writing is awful get in the way of you getting it out there for people to read, critique, and share. If you don’t write, you won’t learn. If you don’t share, you won’t learn. If you don’t read, you won’t learn. It’s a long road you must walk. You will suffer rejection. You will get people that hate your work. It’s going to happen. Not everyone will think your writing is awesome.

You will find people that do love your writing, though. There will be people that clamor for more. They will be the few that understand what you wrote and want more of it from you. Unless you get the words down you will never find those people. If you never get the words written you won’t get those rejection letters to learn from. You won’t be able to share those stories with your friends and watch them cringe as they read that awkward phrase and ask you what you meant. That means you won’t learn what you did wrong and get better. You won’t have that story that does work and does connect with readers.

So get out there and write and know it’s going to suck. Know that it will get rejected. Understand that it will take time before it sees the light of day and readers will get it and understand it and enjoy it. As difficult as it is to get the words down on the page, it’s far more difficult to get them published. It’ll be worth it in the end and you’ll be far happier that you didn’t give up on your piece and just let it flounder in uncertainty. Write those bad stories. Write a lot of them. Eventually you’ll have a gem hidden among those awful stories and you can move forward from there. If you don’t start, you’ll never finish. If you don’t suck, you’ll never be great.

Get out there and write. A lot!

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

I’m writing this on the day that Ray Bradbury died. Some of the best writing advice I ever got was from his little book, Zen and the Art of Writing. It has little to do with Zen, a lot to do with writing. Some of Ray’s biggest advice that I took to heart was to write as much as possible as often as possible. And read. Don’t just read, but READ! Anything and everything. If you can get you hands on it, read it. Read inside your genre, outside your genre, read good books, bad books, magazines, anything. And write whatever your brain decides it wants to write. The only person that can put limits on your creativity is you.

Be voracious: I’ve said this in posts before and I’ve said it different ways. If you want to be a good writer you need to read as much as humanly possible. I read multiple blogs about a variety of topics. I read comic books. I read science fiction, steampunk, fantasy, urban fantasy, romance, erotica, alternate history, horror, biographies, autobiographies, research papers, shampoo bottles. Heck , if it’s got words on it, I’ll take a look. I don’t always like what I read, but I read far more than people know. This year I’ve committed to reading and writing as much as I possibly can. If a day goes by that I don’t read or write I feel like a little bit of me has died. I try to make up for it the next day. I currently have 160 books on my kindle (unread). I’m sure I’ll add more. I also have 5 magazine subscriptions. I will get through all of it and if I run into something that I just can’t read, I have no trouble with putting it aside and moving on to something else.

I’m a voracious reader. I can’t tell you home many times I’ve read a story and thought “I’d do that a little differently” or “There’s a hole here, I’d think it should be filled in.” I’ll do that all the time. I’ve also downloaded a lot of free ebooks lately giving many indie publishers a try and a lot of them are awful, but some are pretty good. I would have never found them if I hadn’t given them a shot. But all this reading gives me encouragement that I to can do this writing thing if only I commit myself.

Be Prolific: I don’t limit myself. Yes, I’ve set daily goals and I try to meet those daily goals, but sometimes I miss. I don’t beat myself up over it. Life it going to happen. But I do try and get back on track and keep at it. I know I’ll most likely never have a full day to just sit and write and I don’t expect that. I do think that I’ll have free time here or a lunch break, or time right before I go to bed, or I’ll get up a little early and try to get some words down. Every little bit helps and adds up faster than you would think. As I write this I’m coming up on 240,000 words on the year and mostly likely when you read it I’ll be over 250,000. I’m not writing at breakneck speed by doing 10,000 words a day in a 20 hour marathon session. I’m writing for 1-2 hours a day almost every day. Some days I’ll get in 3-4, but those are rare. I’ve started to type much faster so I can get words out a lot quicker than I used to.

I also don’t limit myself when it comes to what I’m writing about. My stories are all over the map and I love that. It helps when I’m working on anything in that I can bring a little something from one piece, mix it with another, cross genres, blend character traits, merge story lines. Basically I have a lot of fun when I do sit down and write. I have a fair idea of what works and what doesn’t work in a story and I let it go from there. By reading as much as I do it’s easy to bring in a new idea or concept into an idea that I might not have fully formed in my head and run with it.

Because of Ray Bradbury I’ve released the bonds of my own creativity. I try my best to not get locked down and not let something happen in a story because of preconceived notions. I let my mind run wild and fix the story if I think things have gotten a little out of control. Like I said, I’m only limited by my own imagination. Once you start to read as much as you can and write as often as your schedule allows you’ll find it easier and easier to write more and more.

Once upon a time I had a story idea. It was my only story idea. I wrote that book, but I read more books. I worried about what would happen when I finished that story. What would happen to my creativity well? Would I ever be able to write something else? Reading as much as I have and writing as often as I now am I have a new fear. I’ll never be able to bring all the stories I have in my head to fruition. I have so many ideas, characters, plots, snippets of story that no matter how fast I write, I’ll never get caught up with them all. More come to my head every day and those that stick for more than a couple of days, I write down so I don’t lose them. I’m glad I’ve got a file for this because I’ve got over 100 different ideas and the list keeps going.

Don’t put limits on yourself. Be voracious. Be prolific.

Until next time!

WOO WOO!