5 Year Goals

So, here are some five year goals. I’ve been thinking about where and what to do next, now that Achron is in my wake. The only thing I had in mind was write more, and sell something else, but those were too vague. If I’m going to do this thing, I need to get something that looks like a plan out there. So I did some brainstorming, and this is what I’ve got where a plan would normally go.

• I will have written 3 novels. This one’s moderately aggressive. Not having ever written a novel before, I am of the opinion that I could write a novel in a year. But life can get into funny shapes sometimes, so I’ll give myself a break: 3 novels in five years. It’s totally possible to write a novel a year. It’s also possible that I’ll crash and burn on the shoals of my own hubris. But I’d rather set my sights on something steep yet doable, and fail, than set them too low and meet them.
• I will write short stories in between those novels, and I will constantly be trying to sell them. Perhaps they’ll sell, perhaps they won’t. But either way, it’ll be good practice.
• I will apply to all of the 6 week writer’s workshops: Clarion, Clarion West, or Odyssey. I will also apply to Viable Paradise, but the 6 week workshops are the heavier investment, and I feel like I need to make a heavy investment right about now. It’s asking a lot — of my schedule, my family, and my pocketbook — but I’d really like to go, and I think it would do me tremendous good.
• I will go to a few conventions. This is something I can do without having written something first. If I can, I’d like to sit in on a few panels, perhaps meet a few writers, agents, or other industry folk. Chat them up, maybe buy them a drink. I may even end up having some fun.

I don’t have much experience in the writing industry at the moment, but I do think that Tobias Buckell makes a lot of sense when he talks about recognizing what writers can control, and setting your goals accordingly. Doing all of this writing — the novels, the short stories — in five years is realistic. Expecting that any of them will sell is not. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to chase sales with all my energy, but it does mean that when I get those rejection letters I’ll stick ‘em to the wall, pour myself a drink, and get back to it. As for the rest of it, well — going to conventions, and applying to the workshops — also doable. All of it’s doable.

I’ll get back to you on how it goes.

Crazy Nose Gentlemen

This past week has been very grey, and filled with snow. December was so devoid of any winter precipitation that it felt more like November than a proper winter month. I more or less expect Christmas to come and go without any of the white, flaky stuff, but we usually get some snow before the New Year. Whatever accumulation we missed in December seems to have finally arrived this past week, by the truckload.

This past week has also been very sniffly. My wife, son, and I all three came down with a cold that does not want to move on. There are tiny, gravity-defying English gentlemen standing firmly on the bridge of my nose — the better to make my head pound. Their dogs are running up and down my nasal passage, making me sneeze. One of them fancies himself a funnyman, and has dumped goop inside my head.

I may or may not be taking medication that has altered my account of the situation somewhat. I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Invisible men in my nasal cavity or no, I did my time in front of the keyboard this morning*. I hope to have this story’s first draft wrapped up and ready for my first readers by the end of the month. It will be the first story I’ve completed since Achron‘s script, and it feels very good to get back into a familiar format.

 

(* I wrote this last night.  The tiny English gentlemen have had their way with me; I didn’t finish my writing this morning.  I slept in, and took more cold medication.)

Dreams, Empty Rooms, and Transcribing to Tape

I’ve had video games on my mind, lately.  This train of thought pulled out of the station after I wrote that post about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series a few weeks ago, and has been trundling back and forth between the near and far regions of my brainpan ever since.  I don’t think it’s going to stop if I don’t post this, so here it is.  Why I play video games.

The movie Inception has a metaphor about filmmaking at the heart of its action: movies are like shared dreams.  Not a bad metaphor, and certainly a good movie.  But while movies map easily onto the controlled dreaming that Dom Cobb’s team uses, not all of the every day sorts of dreams that you and I might have don’t.  You can have dreams that are as plotted and wonky as Inception, sure, but you can also have dreams about stacking blocks in the corner of your attic while your grandmother berates you for miserable breakfast you made her — while she dances back and forth, applying clown makeup.

Video games are dreams.  I’m not the first to suggest it, and honestly a lot of the thinking I did about games these past few weeks was based pretty solidly on the contents of that article.  (I read it many years ago.)  But it’s a much more accurate metaphor, I think: video games are solely concerned with the the moment, and very little else.  The internal logic of a video game only matters insofar as it is used to construct the next moment.  Instead of being a narrative controlled by an external creator, the narrative of a video game is constructed, moment to moment, by the player.  The rules are set up beforehand, and sometimes they are as inscrutable as a dream logic.

When I was young, there was a long stretch after I discovered that I could use the tape deck to record things where I did this constantly.  I would make mixtapes from the CDs I got from the library, or record video game music for myself, piped directly from the console into the tape deck.  But I would also transcribe my dreams to tape.

I don’t remember how many tapes I filled up with my own verbal accounts of dreams I’d had the previous night.  Quite a few, if I had to guess.  There is a value to saving a record of those dreams, a place that you went once, and will never be able to properly return to.  But even the imperfect copies that I dictated to audio tape in my parent’s living room were captivating.  I didn’t often listen to them once I’d made a record.  My accounts were meager, and retreading the same ground always paled in comparison to the fuzzy memories I had of the original.  I had to satisfy myself with trapping my dreams in a vessel I could set on the shelf.

But with video games, you can go back to them, and the signal will not have degraded quite as much.

That’s the strength of the medium: to impart a dream, to hammer home an emotional state as simple as the satisfaction of stacking an attractive pile of blocks, to the complex loneliness and impending dread of Shadow of the Colossus, or the layered  horror and descent into James Sunderland’s guilt in Silent Hill 2 – and to do it in a completely visceral way that books and movies cannot.

 

Undeserved Rest

The holidays are always exhausting, and this year has been no different.  I took a nice 5 day weekend to enjoy Christmas with my family, and the extra excitement has left all of us completely wiped out.  I’ve made efforts to return to my normal writing schedule, only to sleep completely through my alarm not once, but twice.  Ben went without an afternoon nap 2 days running, and yesterday developed an ear infection.  A mild one, thankfully; we caught it in time to start nuking it with antibiotics before it was able to do more than make him mildly uncomfortable.  But that has meant some stressful, sometimes sleep-shallow nights.  All of us are ready for another break.

So that’s it.  I’m done for the year.  After the dust settles next week, I’ll suit up again, and descend once more into the ink-stained trenches.  I will be trying out my newly-purchased license of Scrivener for Windows, and making some headway once again.

Until then, I can’t promise that I’ll be updating this site with any regularity.  But then, I’ve never really managed regularity to begin with, so this rest may be a bit undeserved.   But 2011 was a bit of a wild ride – Achron was released, I got a new work-at-home position, and I started really started to put some muscle into writing for myself again.  As for 2012:  I’ve got three short stories in pipeline, and after that, a novel.  I aim to finish all four of those by the end of the year.

May the new year be better than the last.

Merry Happy!

Christmas came and went, and now Ben has a Pacman sweat shirt.  It’s his favorite piece of clothing ever, except if you show him the new hockey jersey he got, or the Blackhawks hat.  Or, you know, any of his older clothes that he still loves.  My sister found it somewhere in the Windy City (at a swap meet, or something).  (I am 1000% jealous, and wear the sweatshirt around my leg at night after he’s gone to bed.  I draw a little face on my knee with a Sharpie, and we run around the house making Pacman noises until I run into a wall.  Then I do the Pacman dying sound, and my wife throws pillows at me until I stop.)

I hope you’ve had a great Christmas, and that what remains of the year treats you even better.