2015 Plans!

Just to end the suspense, yes I did win Nanowrimo 2014 with a no-name bad fan fiction based on my Piarra fiction, which All Needs Massive Editing. I have edits on the first book, Chazho, in progress from last April but need to pick that up again and redo from the redo. Actually read back through the redo and reverse one change, then keep going on it minus that change. If I made my character black, the human characters in America would react to him differently and the book's ending would not work. All history wolud be altered. He has to be and look like an alien version of a typical white bearded young geek Silicon Valley type of dudebro, slightly bewildered by sudden success but still Very Stereotypey.

Greater consciousness can come later in series and will.

Big sudden change of plans though. The Piarra Series is a huge rewrite project and one I do not want to release until at least the first five important books are revised and ready for publication. Most of the rest are sort of fun but not integral to the backstory of the whole, but those five are the events that entire backstory hangs on - with many time travel novels intersecting them. 

So when they go to print, they need to be perfect. They will become canon and anything I don't like in them is "history and fact" as the time travel emperor says when he nails something in as unchangeable, work around it.

What's big is that I am also preparing to release a stand alone book, Elder's Pride, in 2015. I was lucky enough to get Jillian Lambert for my cover artist. I've loved her work for years and years, especially her graphic novel Brainsick. I followed Brainsick through many iterations and finally beta read the final version. Adore the story. Then in chatting in general looking at her current projects, we got to talking and she got interested in Elder's Pride.

So I sent her the rough draft. I've already had a good critique on it from Nonny and one little thing from that critique and others stuck in mind - the prose style of the science passages was imitation Robert Bakker. It fell flat because that isn't my voice. I am not an actual paleontologist or a professor used to doing lectures on evolution. I'm a science fiction writer who handwaves on the science all the time, loves science but likes to make it all up to have a free hand with backstory instead of being nailed to unpleasantly limiting reality. 

So in one of the emails to Jill, it clicked as I tried to explain to her what I'd rather do than fake Bakker-voice. Fake Bradbury voice. Poetic, my real sense of wonder about the history of life and story of evolution, not a scientist's voice at all but a science-loving poet's. Not even imitation Bradbury so much as borrow a couple of his techniques of prose poetry and convey a sense of wonder that these cats are related to my cats and the lineage of all cats is a great beauty in the universe. The book is a cat lovers' novel. 

If you like cats and big cats, you'll enjoy Elder's Pride because the story is about a family of cats forming and migrating to a new territory, settling down there, fighting off rivals and having kittens. There are no humans in it. Humans haven't arrived yet. This is in the long prehistory before any of those people in canoes showed up to carve out their territory among the short faced bears, long tooth cats and American lions who were apparently a whole lot like African lions but just lived on our continent then. MGM was on to something!

It's all about the cats. I did it for a Nanowrimo but I researched it for several years before I did, both online and offline. I miss all my big cats and sabercats reference books, they're still in Arkansas. Fortunately though, all this book really needs is some attention to Point of View to keep it oriented for readers and my replacing all the dry science with poetic richness - and poetic conciseness, that happens too when poetry's applied. 

And Jill, who is a very good realist artist as well as graphic novel artist, is going about it a lot like James Gurney, making plans to do a maquette of one of the cats to draw from. This is going to be so beautiful. Heck, I may draw the cats again too in order to keep myself focused on the edits. But the author sketches are for the website of the book, the cover goes to Ms. Lambert. This is going to be awesome!

It is the beginning of the dam break. I have way over 50 novels stashed in my hard drive that need editing and prep. As I start shoveling them into availability the proceeds will go toward the next books in line, until I've got them all out somewhere earning. Only when I've got through the most salable 20 or so will I even start getting down to "maybe this is a toss rather than a rewrite" category. Most are pretty salable. 

Glad to be starting with "cats." I might return to them in November 2015 too, either big wild cats or small ones.

Writers Block II - Better Taste than Skill

I was mired in Writers Block for decades. From the time I was a little kid dedicated to becoming a science fiction writer someday up to the present, I’ve beaten myself up for not writing more, not editing what I write, not sending it out promptly enough or releasing more self published titles. There was no excuse.

My worst discouragement came from me. Every critical comment from someone else sank deep and broke my soul because I knew it was true. I could look at my writing and see that I had overblown descriptions, bad dialogue, rambling tangents, unfinished work. My tastes were higher than my skills.

That’s true for any beginner in any of the arts.

That’s what makes criticism sink in and take hold as so personal. The myth that “Talent” means you don’t have to learn the craft destroys millions of writers before they even start. Beginners do not produce Shakespeare quality immortal prose on their first time out. It’s a miracle if they can produce a recognizable story with a beginning, a middle and an end. All of us have to teach ourselves the craft and develop unique personal methods to achieve the same goal - good readable fiction.

The way to get past that stage where your taste is better than your skill is to date what you do. Measure your progress against your own past results and nothing else. If your new story is better than your last story, you have progress!

Celebrate it.

Give yourself a pat on the back. Shout it out on Facebook. “I love my latest story, it came out so much better than I expected.” It’s okay to do that. Tooting your own horn on minor accomplishments is socially appropriate in a positive social circle.

What will keep you from turning into a selfish arrogant egotist is going around to all your friends’ profiles and congratulating them when they post a cute cat photo, cleaned the garage, finally finished that accounting course they’ve slaved at for months. People need encouragement to complete long term tasks. Your best, most reliable source of encouragement is yourself.

Being able to post progress by quantity breaks that block to a large extent too. You wrote 10,000 words. That’s a big achievement, the first time you do it that’s almost an impossible goal. It doesn’t matter if they’re not publishable. It doesn’t matter if you go back to the idea, trim it down and edit to wind up with 1,500 words of perfect short-short story. You got something to edit.

There are no bad rough drafts.

We have computers to work on now. We type digitally. Erasing and rewriting doesn’t wear through the paper or mean using up reams of it just for practice. You can keep editing the same story through all the years of learning the craft and at the end it’s just as beautiful as if you’d learned it by writing hundreds of different stories each a little better than the last. That’s your choice.

So don’t throw out anything. Date your drafts. Save your early drafts because there’s a stage of learning to edit where your judgment can get skewed and the edited version isn’t as good as the rough draft.

I did that a lot until I finished editing Raven Dance and still did it occasionally later on. It doesn’t matter. Changes are easily reversible if you save drafts.

In order to get past the stage where your tastes are better than your skills, you have to believe in yourself. That’s what I’ve heard all my life about it - believe in yourself.

That hardly ever helps in its pure form.

Believe in your ability to learn. Trust that your idea is a good idea. Trust that if you love this story, readers will love it too once it’s been polished. Trust that you are capable of learning all the editing skills needed to turn that wretched pile of mistakes into a wonderful story as good as you imagined it would be.

Then remember that learning is life long. Getting one good book or story published doesn’t mean that there aren’t new levels of craft ahead of you. While you live, there will always be ways to improve your work.

I write better than I used to and not as well as I will.

That’s the core of my confidence. That’s the attitude that wins for the long term. It’s not about trying to write as well as Stephen King. By the time I do, my writing won’t be at all like Stephen King’s because I’m Robert Sloan instead. He had a different childhood. His first love was a different person. His childhood nightmares aren’t mine and his pleasures and struggles in life are his own.

We’ll have a lot in common because I also grew up on the same cultural common ground. The better I get, the easier it is to tell that I wrote it. The more I conquer my bad prose habits, the cleaner and clearer my ideas will reach readers even if they don’t have much in common with me at all.

We’re all human and we’re writing for people who speak our language. If you’ve got multiple languages, I envy you. I’ve never been able to retain anything but English because I didn’t have enough social contacts in other languages. I might manage to learn one now that I live in multicultural San Francisco but out in white Midwestern suburbs, I forgot languages within months after the classes ended.

So that’s where “Write Every Day” really matters.

When you journal and write your life story to yourself, you really are practicing. Writing in first person makes you a sympathetic character. You are the protagonist. You face your flaws and understand them, you celebrate your triumps, you understand the obstacles you faced.

It also helps to make public commitments to a writing schedule. Take classes - assignments that need to be turned in on time will get done to the best of your ability. They also break down the skills into more manageable multiple topics. Enter challenges like NaNoWriMo or its editing counterpart. Start a blog on a topic you enjoy and update it weekly or even daily.

It’s all still writing. You may not think the blog about your favorite hobby is improving your fiction skills, but it is. You’re practicing. When it comes time to explain the science fiction premise, you’ve already explained the fine differences between brands of pastels or grains of wood for carving. You’ve done it in a readable way and have readers who like your content.

Everything you write contributes to your skills. When they don’t meet your high expectations, trust your ability to stick to it until they do. The only thing that can stop you is dying before you do it - and even then, it’s better to die trying than to give up. Everything you’ve written to date is wonderful because it brims with potential.

Someday you will reach a point where your skills do meet your expectations. A milestone comes when you read a published book that’s lousier than your latest efforts. Another when you start to see a lot of them. Like learning to cook, there comes a point where you can do it exactly to your own tastes and it comes out fine.

Trust yourself. At that point, you’ll be finding joy in the process even if it was a struggle up till then. It doesn’t need to be though, not if you can take pleasure in the journey and reward yourself for progress without expecting perfection.

The best part of it is that as I write and edit more, I spot problems in earlier manuscripts that are easy to fix. Difficulties that used to be insurmountable come into reach, take a bit less effort until they're routine. Once they're as easy as hunting for typos, even the editing process becomes a pleasure.

I had good ideas, memorable characters and great plots in those earlier novels. When I polish them up to my present skill it's as much fun as writing a new one.

One big internal milestone for me was the point I’d pay money for something I wrote. It's indescribably sweet. I can always get more of it. If I get to the end and want more, I can do something about that. Right now. Write the sequel and find out what happens.

That’s a joy worth working towards. Go for it!