We’re substantially into the long process and have done some incredible world-building on a world I’m really excited about.

This weekend I learned that RACC (The Regional Arts and Culture Council) said yes to our grant proposal. We’re funded! Toot toot!

I’m sure you will hear more about this as we go — part of the grant requires that we host a public performance from the piece. Likely we’ll also chat about the pleasures and difficulties of doing together what is traditionally a very isolated, solo art. Fortunately for us, David and I know how to argue productively. Though by the end, who knows, Kung Fu may become necessary.

If you wish to see a short summary of our work (or how much $$ we got), you can see all awarded grants here. Do an in-document search for my name.

And writers: As I begun the grant process, I didn’t even realize that RACC supported literary projects. I can’t recommend highly enough how accessible RACC was during this time, and how much they seemed invested in my success. Here’s a quote from Ingrid Carlson, a Grants Officer at RACC, who wrote me the following:

“First, let me say that we offer the same percentage of Project Grants in the literary discipline as we offer in every other discipline.  The challenge is that we only receive a very small handful of applications from literary artists, as opposed to a discipline like visual arts.  We fund about 40% of the literary arts applications – the same as in other categories.  The problem is that we average about 7 literary project grants and only a couple from individuals each year.  It would be great to get more!”

Subtle hint…

Thanks Ingrid & RACC!

&

http://occupywriters.com/

When you’re getting started or blocked the whole process can feel like some kind of dark secret. A black magic that requires just the right set of spells. When I go to author readings, inevitably there’s someone in the audience that asks how so-and-so does it. Use a typewriter or a computer? At night or in the morning? There’s no one right way to write, obviously, and everybody has got their own style. I’m co-writing a book with my friend David Naimon, and just last night we compared our radically different approaches to writing — but we’re both producing at an equal rate.

Differences aside, I feel like I’ve got a pretty useful bag of tricks for flat-out composing. Here they are, I hope Felix (or you) finds them useful:

- Write first thing in the morning. I used to hate this advice — early bird gets the worm, blah blah blah. But I kept seeing writer interviews in which the writer talked about writing in the dark every morning. Finally, a couple of years ago I forced myself to become a morning person, and now I can’t speak for it highly enough. I try to get up every morning at 5:30. Make your pot of coffee at night and set it up on a timer. If you have a pet, your pet will quickly acclimate to the schedule and help you keep it (my cat starts nagging me if I don’t get up now). It’ll be dark, everyone will be sleeping, and you own the world. I can usually get in 250 to 1000 words before 7am, when the house wakes up. The rest of the day feels like a free ride after that. You’re going to need to be writing closer to 1700 words a day to make your 50k goal in November, if you’re doing NaNoWrMo, so you might have this as your first shift.

- Edit the previous day’s work first. It’s hard as hell to sit in front of a blank piece of paper and start from scratch. Going over your previous day’s work gives you sort of a running start. Imagine it as the run along the diving board before you dive into the deep end. It gets you up to speed on where the narrative is going, and allows you to tighten as you go.

- Write on paper or use a typewriter. Computers are demons of distraction, and worse, they allow you to edit as you compose. Forget about editing — when you’re composing, sprint forward. If you use a pen and paper it’s much harder to worry about what you’ve written and there are no other distractions.

- Write only the good stuff. The worst thing in the world is to be faced with a scene you can’t figure out how to start, or one that seems too daunting to write. After being blocked, many times I’ve found the scene I was struggling with doesn’t belong in the book. If it feels really hard, or you feel like you’ve got something that you feel obligated to write in order to make something else happen, then alas, it’s probably junk. Write the stuff that seems fun. I don’t mean funny, just work that you’re not fighting against. In my experience, nine times out of ten work that I’ve fought with bitterly gets thrown out.

- Write out of order. I usually have a sense of future scenes in a book. If you get stuck on the scene you’re on, write something that happens way down the road. Write the ending! You’ll probably need to edit those scenes later on – but the writing of them can also inform scenes earlier in the book.

- Keep a tally of your word count. Post it up on the wall and mark each day down. After a while it’ll begin to feel less like marking your prison-stay off on the the cell wall and more like money in the bank. As a bonus, add a note on how that day went — that way you might spot trends. (How *did* I write 5000 words in one day?)

- Take long walks with a voice recorder. You can get a decent digital recorder for about $30-$40 (or use your phone if it has the capability, though you have to guard against distraction there). I’ve found that just setting out with the book in mind and spending 45 minutes on the road can allow you to create quite a lot of work over time. Sometimes it’s just ideas, sometimes it’s actual writing. Also, you feel like a bit of a detective walking about and taking notes to yourself. Record everything, commentary about passers-by, rants, speak the character’s voices, build the world you’re writing in — just like the composing sprint, you want as much material as you can.

- Transcribe. If you’ve used a voice recorder or used pen & pencil you’ve got bonus material. This always feels like free money. Start off your writing schedule by simply typing in what you’ve previously done. It allows for a quick edit as you put it in, and will also give you that vital ramp into the mindset of the story (the diving board again).

- Edit ruthlessly. I hate to be adding this in, since you’re mostly concerned with getting it on paper. This comes later. If you’re doing a sprint, like NaNoWrMo requires, then you’re going to be adding in a ton of cruft. If you really like it, but it doesn’t fit, set it aside for another book. I just finished a novel of 145k words, and dumped at least 50k words from it. Before it’s over, I’ll probably be chopping out more. There are an endless supply of words in the world, the trick is using the right ones.

Good luck at NaNoWrMo everybody – let me know how it goes.

Strange Horizons is a professional market that pays its writers well. My experience editing my story Birds with Karen Meisner, one of their editors, was really top-notch. She was fully engaged with piece, and made sure the story shined. And Strange Horizons is widely read, too (how do I know? Among other places, Birds turned up in Chinese, was debated in Sweden and reviewed by Locus Magazine)

As I mentioned, they’re having a fund drive, which means you get to directly support a well-curated list of writers producing excellent work. Also, their fund drive includes a number of prizes — donated works from their writers (including, incidentally, a signed copy of Couch).

Strange Horizons Fund Drive

My piece on the theme is now out. It’s a strange little cubicle-landia, ad-agency piece, entitled “Launch Night at Dante’s Ad Agency“, and in the spirit of James Frey, that pretty much happened to me exactly.

My fellow writing-group member Karen Munro had her piece on the same theme (though a different sort of launch) come out last week. It’s called ‘Flight Suit‘, and it’s a great piece. Check it out.

The section I read was extremely fun – and just look at that cover!

While I’m at it – I just had a look at some of the other books by writers I met while there. I read sections from nearly all these books/stories, and it’s really fun and exciting — nay, magical — to see them in print now.

Karen Joy Fowler published What I Didn’t See

Alexander Jablokov has published a lot of stories.

Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck co-wrote Leviathan Wakes

And Daniel, who obviously does not ever sleep, ever, also published the first of a new epic fantasy series The Dragon’s Path

James Patrick Kelly was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards for his novelette Plus or Minus

Kristin Livdahl published the novella A Brood of Foxes

David Levine published a ton of short stories

Walter Jon Williams published Deep State

And the great Maureen F McHugh’s new book After the Apocalypse will be out this October, 2011.

Impressive, people!

Looks like that probably won’t be the final title, as there are several books out there already called ‘The Enclave‘

All the same, I’m very happy to have it in a version I can pass off to a first round of readers. It’s been a couple of years of radio silence with it.  It came in at 121k words, though I suspect there’ll be some wrangling yet. Hope you’re having a swell Presidents day.

OK:

- My short story Hamlet was picked up by Bellevue Literary Review and should be out this Spring (here’s BLR on Facebook).

- I believe the Turkish-language rights for Couch have been sold to Domingo Publishing. So if you speak Turkish, voila!

- David Naimon and I are now officially calling our co-written short story, entitled The Voyage, a book. So presumptuous! So exciting! We’re just under 20k words in.

- Laura Moulton’s website is way over-due for an overhaul, which is my spousal responsibility. So in the meantime I’ll mention a few of her goings-on here:

• She was awarded a Regional Arts & Culture Council grant for her project StreetBooks!
• She has a great piece coming out in Street Roots soon (< That link searches for ‘Laura Moulton’ on streetroots.org – right now it just comes up with her Brazil article & Project Hamad)
• Her book is coming along – (I’m currently reading the first 100 pages).

- Speaking of novels…mine is still in progress. Laura’s editing the first 75 pages which are considered to be semi-final. There are another 325 pages lying in wait of further edits.

- Taleoh.com is still being coded…

I think that’s it, or all that I can remember presently. Enjoy the last few days of 2010.

If you’d rather read Birds translated into Chinese (I assume by a human?) and then back to English again (by Google’s machinery), you can give that a go. The last line in that new hybrid version is “My mind floated the infinite regret.” Which brings to mind the Airborne Toxic Event from DeLillo’s White Noise.

Ever since, it’s taunted me, calling out in its helium voice: “Are you ready to become a smart writer?” Apparently my plodderly, non-smart-writer-footfalls shakes it into sudden, optimistic action. It wants to save me. It wants to pump me up.

Link to file if it doesn’t play
Go head, play it a couple of times. Now a couple of more. Now imagine you’re up in the dark of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell to resolve the inverted convolution that is your plot. That snarled, brambly, thorny patch of chaos? Yes, that one. The cat wants out, the cat wants in, the coffee maker is slowly leaking, and this guy, this guy is asking you if you’re ready to become a smart writer. Well, are you?

Here’s a close-up of his face.

You can tell by his coked-up eyes, he’s quite confident in his own writing ability. He just wants to help you with yours. On the bright side, there’s a button on the gizmo that I’ll be using to write my next book, or possibly I’ll use one of the others to create a smart doodle or a smart shape. The future is mine!

That’s all.

I saw Diana Rowland do this at the Rio Hondo Writer’s Workshop. While hers had way more zombies in it than both our novels put together, it was a very fun exercise. Though made significantly less fun by the fact that no one was eating anyone else’s brain.

Laura’s (and Laura) is on the right. Orange bits represent unwritten scenes — she’s pointing out her strategery here. (you can click the picture to see it larger, but not really large enough to read the text.)

Mine is all in rows on the left, with just those last four pink squares at the end signifying unwritten scenes. Quite by chance our books are at about the same place — just a few short steps away from completed first draft. At one hopeful, innocent moment long ago I thought perhaps that I’d only need a few edit-passes through before completion. Since then, and mid-way through the book, I radically changed what the book was about, so, well, I suppose you could say I’m a lot less innocent now.

I’m not yet sure what I’ve learned from the exercise yet except that Post-it notes make terribly garish wallpaper, and that whenever I enter the room I feel how my book looms there brightly-colored and ominous. Though I do revisit the wall now and then and move the papers around, and then move them back. So I got that going for me.