• 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Catching the possum is the most dog-like thing she’s ever done.  This is a dog that doesn’t like to go outside if the stars aren’t aligned properly.

But once she got the possum inside, she moped around the house because someone was in her crate.

Even stranger, the possum found my missing USB thumb drive.  It’s been missing for three months.  If you look closely, there is a red jingly ball to the left of the possum’s muzzle.  Right in front of it is the red thumb drive.  Thanks, possum!  (Now go with the nice Animal Control guy.  He came in a nice white van, and has possum candy.)

POST-SCRIPT: This should have gone up last Thursday or Friday, but I wasn’t paying attention, and it sat in my drafts folder, unnoticed and alone.  Sorry about that.

Consequentially, there’s also a lot of writing advice and analysis out there.  Digesting  properly is a tricky business in its own right.  If you suck down every last drop, there’s a good chance you’ll choke on it, maybe even decide to go at it on your own.  Screw those guys, you think, I  can come up with my own advice.  I read good books.  Why not disassemble those, figure out how those guys did it, and move on from there?

Well.  For starters if you’re hunting for writing advice, you may not be equipped to tackle that particular sack full of hornets.  Maybe you don’t have the skillz on hand to pay those billz.  (Maybe you do.  I’m just a jabbering loony.)  Going down that particular path can lead you into difficult and dangerous situations, diving down through the chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words, past the individual letters, and into weirdo space.  You get your lifeline tangled and suddenly, instead of doing sensible things you’re staring at the white space between words until your eyes cross.

Sometimes, a thing can be analyzed too deeply.

As most bits on this blog on writing are about me, it should come as no surprise to you, gentle reader, that I did this.  I talked myself into thinking that I could look beyond the page and figure out what made the writers I loved ticked.  I could see the spark that marched their words onto a page, and having seen it, I could bring that fire back to kindle the sad, greasy wick at the center of the pre-frontal writing cortex in my brain.  (Shut up, it’s there.  I looked it up on the Internet.)  I stared at the white space, then I wrote, then I stared some more.

Lo and behold, I was writing was terrible.  Horrid.  Bland.  And it didn’t get any better until I stopped staring at someone else’s pages, and got back to the business of writing my own.

I don’t know if this post will help.  Maybe you’ll get some mileage out of it, maybe you won’t.  Either way, it’s been useful for me to write it, so here’s the big WARNING sign:

There is nothing more important to a writer at the beginning of their journey than finding their voice.  Don’t look elsewhere for it.  It’s inside of you.  Lurking.  The key to finding it is to write a whole bunch.  End of story.  Relax a little bit, and keep writing.  You’ll find what you’re looking for, and suddenly all the hills and valleys in your work start to make sense.  They’re a part of a pattern, and that pattern is you.  Once you’re square with your own voice, then you’ve got the foundation you need to start anything.

(My office is right across the hall from my son’s bedroom. I don’t get to close the door because my cats will cause a fuss until the door is opened. So the lights stay off, and the door stays open. It’s an odd arrangement, but peaceful.)

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games have a special place in my heart, if you haven’t guessed, and the news that the tiny Ukrainian developer-that-could behind it has shuttered its doors isn’t the news that I was hoping for today.  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was in development, and that project is now dead as well.

The three games that they leave behind — Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat — are all excellent, and worth your time if you’re willing to do a bit of extra work to make your time playing the game a little smoother.  Out of the box, Shadow of Chernobyl is a bug-ridden mess, and desperately needs the tender loving caress of one of the many community made enhancement packs.  The later games are much more stable.  My mod of choice was the Complete series, a labor of love by a very talented texture artist to improve the graphics of the game and roll in the best bug fixes and improvements the modding community was able to put together.  If you’re going to play any of the games, I would recommend picking up the relevant Complete pack.

The uniqueness of these games will ensure that one of the three will always be installed on my gaming PC.  With any luck, the modding community will continue to pump out visual improvement packs for a few years to come.

This is the view from my desk since I started working from home full time. Shelf space is at a premium in our house, and any place that I can stack more things out of the range of cats, dog, or curious toddler immediately finds itself thoroughly festooned.

You may notice that some of those DVDs have already been savaged. That happened years ago, courtesy of a dog driven mad by the work being done on the street just outside our house. Nothing was lost, but a whole lot of stuff ended up being de-prettified. (Is so a word.  Go ahead, look it up!  What?  I can’t hear you…)

This newly reconfigured office doesn’t look much different from the pictures that I posted a while back, so I won’t put any further office images up.  Things have gotten a little messier anyway.  And there are only so many ways to configure a 9×11 room.