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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Sunday, July 27, 2014

I Will Share My Experiences in Real Time

Part 2 of my Mission Statement

So I’m fresh out of a creative writing program and ready to set the world on fire! But once I’m out of prison for the arson charge, I will rock the party that rocks the party.

And while I'm at it, I'm going to find out what that even means.

And when I do, I’m going to post it right here.

Sometime around nine years prior to this writing, I hung up a sauce-stained tie, stopped managing The Old Spaghetti Factory in Concord, and gave up the USDA, public service announcement recipe for Happiness And The American Dream, and struck off on my own path. I had tried the "real" job, "real" life, "real" responsibilities, and even saved up for a "real" house and was talking about "real" kids with my "real" wife.

All that realness sucked balls. Sadly, not in the way that is vaguely tantalizing.  More like in the way that an overenthusiastic teen with braces does it.

So I dumped all that "real" crap (except the "real" wife; she did the dumping in that case) and I started writing. I got a flip over haircut and I told my mom I just really needed to focus on my art.

This was after I visited Esma's secret lab.
Why does she even HAVE that other lever.
Unfortunately, what I produced was little more than a steaming pile of crap. That is when I began my mission.

Well, really I began a quest.

Many years earlier I had become "A Writer"....Dorothea Brande style...but I needed help with the craft itself. My prose was rough around the edges. My grammar was pretty atrocious. I liked writing about farm boys fighting dark lords. I had to learn to do with quality what I loved to do with quantity.

And so I began my quest. I was told the location of an ancient, magical sword by this venerable dude who looked amazingly like Burgess Meredith. I had to kill a troll. (There was even witty banter.) I got the sword. I went back to the guy and asked him how this was supposed to make me a better writer, and he kind of stared at me blankly and blinked."

Writer?" he said. "Who the hell would ever want to be a writer? There's no money in that. What you need to do is lop the heads off of dragons. The bigger the dragon, the better. Lots of money. Pussy too. You'll be drowning in that shit. And not that second rate stuff either; I'm talking the ones with the legs that go all the way up! Chicks dig dragonslayers."

 Turned out I we’d gotten our wires crossed somewhere. And when I said “learn to write” he had heard “kill the hydra.” (Not sure where the hell that came from. They barely even rhyme.) I left him the sword, in case he found the right sort of hero, and headed off.

 Fucking sexist kook.

Without a wizened old mentor cliche, I didn’t see how I was ever going to learn to write. I kept putting on montage music and then sitting down to the keyboard, but by the end of the song, I was still looking at mediocre writing. (What do you expect, those songs are only like two minutes long.)

I tried to catch a chicken, but even when I did, my prose did not improve. I also had a horrible case of histioplasmosis from fungus in the droppings. That put me in the hospital for like a month.

So I decided to quest for the secret to craft myself. No mentor.

Perhaps I would assemble a rag tag group of misfits along the way--hopefully including a ninja who is looking for his father–a ninja who can pull fish right out of a river. We would hopefully be joined by a talking firedog, a gruff dude with a machine gun for an arm, and a giant stuffed animal ridden by a cat with a megaphone. And if I was very, very lucky, my team might also have a Mandroid.

Each of them would join me for their own purposes. But we would face the Dark Lord together.

The....um...."dark lord" of shitty writing.

Regardless, I was going to walk this road, mentor or no. Nothing was going to stop me. I even queued up "Break My Stride" I looked to the horizon, where the sun was setting, and dragged a blade across my palm (different blade—I gave the enchanted sword back to Burgess remember; try to keep up). As I did, with wind whipping my hair, I cried, “I swear by my blood, I will learn to write.”

And it was pretty dramatic except for fucking Matthew Wilder's voice.

  If we never ever again–as a culture–permit the combination of hippie mustaches and leather pants it will be too soon. 

To this day, if you go to that spot, where the wind tousled my hair, and my blood spilled to the ground, and you look where my life fluid touched the fecund soil beneath me, you will find.....nothing of any particular significance.

My quest led me to college....where some said mentors still lived. But where the demon to be defeated was college itself.

Thus I battled with college. For seven years we fought. College smashed me, beat me, slammed me into walls, threw me to the ground, chewed me up and spit me out, and once swallowed me and digested me. But every time it thought the fight was over, every time I looked well and truly dead, and it turned away, I would stand up, grab my Trapper Keeper and mechanical pencil, and say, “I’m not done. I’m going to be a writer. Is that the best you've got?"

College lays dead at my feet.  Yet the quest goes on.

I found that college (even a creative writing degree) had very little to do with being a writer, and a lot more to do with a firm basis in general education, literary analysis, and following directions. It had some to do with writing (though not as much as I'd have hoped), but almost nothing to do with being a writer. It also probably wrung out the desire to write from more writers than it ever taught the craft. Now I had to fuse the knowledge of how to write with the love of writing itself, and combine it with one serious fuckton of work.

That's where you tuned in. And even though most of this post is about the past, what I'm trying to get at is that you found me still gathering up my motley crew on my way The Black Fortress (even though neither they nor my sentient ninja star will be nearly as useful at defeating The Beast as the Flamethrower of LOVE™). I haven't even found the firemares yet.

Damn, Colwyn, you can really make your "love" shoot far...and hit faces with amazing accuracy.

Here is my pledge, however. Whatever I discover, I will share here. If I learn a trick, I’ll put it here.  If I discover a sure fire way to network, it’ll be up here by the next weekday. If I hit pay dirt along one avenue or hit nothing but walls along another, you will know it happened. If there's a wait involved in an acceptance process, I'll detail every agonizing day of it.

It will also show you the banal in excruciating real time. No overnight success stories. If I start to carve out something, you will see how it took me years of writing every day to get there. You will watch me improve from old articles to new. You will see my career as it happens. You will know what to expect.

The new leg of my journey begins, and I’m going to chronicle it here. And if any insight I glean helps you in your own quest--be it the weaknesses of trolls, the fact that kingsfoil stimulates creativity (because that shit is the best medicine ever, for anything, even though only one person seems to know it), or that publishers have a weakness for silver and cold steel--I will rejoice. And if any place I point out troll droppings, ogre sniper rifle laser sight dots, or vampric agents, because I went through it and was able to warn you off, I will also rejoice.

The tricks and the pitfalls: I will share them all. And we can take the next part of this fantastic quest together.

Best to imagine me as Madmartigan looking at Arik with an impish smile. "Wanna come with us?"

Or if your bent is a little more sinister and Sithy, you can imagine Darth Vader at the end of Empire: "Join me! Together we can rule the galaxy."

You know...whatever bakes your churro.

5 comments:

  1. I'm up for an adventure with Madmartigan! I'll even admit to having a powerful desire to cosplay Sorsha. Alas and alack, my costume making skills are on par with my gardening skills. I get the hint, Universe, I'll stick to writing. (But... GAH! DCC! Cosplay! [stares at spousal unit] [grins evilly] A Knight of Dayala, first Goddess of the Heartwood... Draw, Monkey, draw!! I have a sword to make!)

    And this is what insomnia looks like.

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    1. I....um......I THINK this might go well for spousal unit, but I'm not sure.

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    2. Probably not. I want him to DEFINITIVELY draw a clear design of what the character's tunics look like. All I keep getting are his words, which are highly contradictory. He's an artist; he used to be a member of SCA. It should be easy.

      Or so one would think. Hmmmm. I believe it's time for some Google Fu. "Point to the picture or pictures that most closely represent what a Dayalan Knight would wear at Court. Thank you." Bwahaha

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  2. Looking forward to it!

    Aerten you are lucky - your insomnia is interesting and exciting! Mine involves bumping into doorways and apologizing to them in the dark.

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    1. It's only interesting because I do all my bumping into doorways (sometimes I apologize) during the day when I'm theoretically awake. :-) Also, I'm not allowed to be completely insane in the office. I'm told it scares the visitors. Whatever.

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