The Witching Hour When Magic Works (Revision)

[A revision of one of my earliest articles.]

I am very, very nocturnal.

I've never met anyone as fully nocturnal as I am. I regularly go to sleep after dawn and wake with only a few hours until sunset. In the winter sometimes this can be positively unsettling--especially given how much I enjoy being in the sun. (Yeah yeah, ironic. I know.)

I don't particularly have any trouble being diurnal if I want to be as long as I get my eight hours somewhere. I've had classes at eight in the morning before at both SFSU and at work, and while I wasn't particularly chipper to have my alarm going off at 5:30, I could function just fine if I'd gotten to bed by 10.  Right now, of course, I'm caring for a one year old who wakes up at 7am with a giggle. But left to my own devices, my schedule slides into the night, and almost every vacation while I was in school ended with a concerted attempt to get myself back to some semblance of human time. Honestly, I don't know how vampires deal with logistics. Paying their bills and scheduling dental appointments must be a titanic pain.

I guess they floss their fangs really well.

My mom was actually an early bird while I was growing up, and imposed an 8pm bedtime until I was well into my teens to keep me from becoming a little child of the night. When she finally loosed me from the fetter of "bedtime" we dealt with some friction for a while because I was acting like a typical lazy teen who slept until noon, and she felt like she had to be the typical mom who told me that no one ever made a million dollars by putting work before success in dictionaries that are early to rise...or maybe I'm messing that cliche up. It was only after I pointed out that I wasn't actually particularly lazy, that I had been up until four, I was getting the same eight hours as always, but that they happened to be shifted to a much later slot.

I may have also simultaneously pointed out that my step-brother was the one sleeping ten and twelve hours a night, so could she please bother him. She finally stopped kicking my door open with a bellowing "Okay kiddo!"--not that she stopped playing Steely Dan at 100 decibels in the next room.

I almost wish I weren't an only child. Throwing siblings under the bus is awesome!

The night is when Cathamel really turns up the juice for me. I can sit and write at any time, but when everything is still and people are asleep and my mind is humming from the day's events--that's when ideas just kind of flood out. A lot of writers talk about writing first thing in the morning, but my thoughts are often turned too inward at that time for inspiration. Everything is meta--and when I do morning writing regularly, it turns into hundreds of pages of how I WANT to write, plans, soul searching, and navel gazing ABOUT writing, but with little actual prose.

At the end of the day I am almost trembling with ideas. Inspiration built up through the day of "wouldn't that be neat" and "that could be a story" and it's almost like I'm a whistling tea kettle by the time I sit down.

Writers (even famous and successful ones) don't really agree on much. They sort of think writing is magic rather than process. Talk to them, and you'll get this feeling that they're talking about casting a spell or some kind of religious ritual or something, and so when they get quoted, there's usually this sense of absolute indelible truth, and not so much a sense of "Hey, there's this thing that works for me."

Most writers are nothing without their affectations. They cling to things like "a certain pen" or "drafting on paper". (Or an anthropomorphic Asian dragon.) On its own this isn't problematic. Depending on how you define "magic" we create our own magic when we shape our world with only our minds, if our minds weren't powerful forces, there wouldn't be placebo effects in medical trials. Just because something has a perfectly rational, scientific explanation doesn't mean it's not magic..

Okay, technically that's EXACTLY what it means, but describing something as vague as creativity requires artistic license and shit, so have some damn wonder and romance about the fucking universe, will ya?

If someone thinks their special pen or special writing time is what works, it does. Because that's how we tick when we believe. The problem I see with writers is that they forget how personal such magic is. They forget that a ritual is their own and that their muse visits them--and others have their own muses and rituals. They project their own proclivities into other writers' rituals about writing, even though much of that advice would have mutually exclusive contradictions if not patent absurdity.

No writer has the keys to the kingdom about the creative process, and certainly no writer has the keys to the kingdom of YOUR creative process.

Writing in the morning is a good example. It works for a lot of people. It even worked for me at other stages in my development. I can do it.  I often have to because of how my life works.  But sometimes it's just not the same kind of creative flood as writing at the end of the day--especially in the still of night with my brain humming from the day.  Listen to some writers go on about it, and you might think that morning writing is the only possibility. For anyone. Ever. Despite the fact that thousands of published, famous, and brilliant authors have written at night after they worked a long day in the cannery or after they put the kids to bed.

Young writers are particularly vulnerable to these traps.

They're always asking authors about their process, not in a way that you think they might gain some illumination or edification, but as if they will somehow unlock the secret ritual that will make them successful. I swear to god, I once sat next to a young woman who wanted to know what color ink a poet used, AND SHE TOOK NOTES WHEN HE ANSWERED HER.

The problem is....you can't use someone else's magic.  It's theirs.  It would be like using someone else's prescription glasses. The rituals of a person are as unique as their fingerprints or facial structure.

Another person's magic won't work for you.

Discovering ritual spells like this is a personal process of individual power. There's wisdom to be gleaned from a writer who reveals something you've never tried before, or in seeing diversity's rainbow when it comes to how differently the creative process...well PROCEEDS in different people, but at the end of the day working the magic during your own personal witching hour is what it's all about.  Try their ritual to get an idea, but you're only learning how other people cook, so one day you can write your own recipe.

If you're going to believe in magic, you have to play by magic's rules. Your mind is the real power, and you're trying to trick it into unleashing some of its potential when and where you want in a placebo-like way while it tells you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That means you can't use someone else's affectations and tricks. That would be like using another shaman's totem. Your mind may well be savvy to such things. You have to find the affectations and tricks that work on YOU.

I hate to dispense advice as trite as "do what works," but among writers that can be a welcome relief to the usual fare, and it probably needs to be said. Write an hour a day or six. Write on the bus. Write after dark. Write first thing in the morning.  Write last thing before bed. It doesn't matter as long as you find what works.

For you.

Because when you and your muse stop grinding against each other and go Wonder Twin powers on your writing, that's when the doors fly open and nothing will ever be the same. But that can't happen if you're stuck trying some other writer's magic. If you want to TRY writing on stone tablets at high noon because that's what Biznekio DeKlackicus did, more power to you, but don't be afraid to say "Sod this" if it's not working.

Learn to cast your own spells.

A Writer Goes to Burning Man

I first wrote this two years ago about being a writer in a performance and installation art space and each year since there has been a serendipitous opportunity provided by an angel of benevolence. This will be my 13th year on the playa.

This will be my eleventh year at Burning Man. 

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.

Oh and lots and lots (and lots) of dust.

Except for me, there isn't very much sex or drugs or rock and roll.

Whenever I get back from the playa, people try to find out about how many orgies I had, if I did all the drugs or just most of them, or how often I danced all night at a camp with a speaker the size of my house.

I always end up disappointing them a little when I let them know that I don't really go for those things.

Then there's usually a long pause and they say, "Well...why the hell DO you go?" (It's hard not to hear the implication of "Cause....you know....what else is there?" in the question.) Their faces screw up into little clusters of confusion wrinkles radiating outward from their crinkled eyes and mouths.

Still it's a fair question.  And I think "for the art" is worse cop out than saying you read Playboy for the articles. Even when it's accurate it's not like you can't get good articles (or really neat art installations) some place else. With everything that's a little iffy about BM's eclectic blend of whitewashed liberals and rabid libertarians, what's out there for me?


First, I think it's important to understand that why I go has changed over the years.

Anyone's relationship to an annual event is going to evolve in over a decade if for no other reason than they were a younger person all those years ago and they have evolved. My relationship to fast food, literature, memory foam, music, homeless people, and cheese has also evolved. My relationship to threesomes has grown no less fond, but has, however, become cynically realistic.

When I started going to the Black Rock Art Festival, I was in my twenties.  I was still married.  I hadn't started college yet.  I was still almost two years away from the fateful encounter with a trio of criticism torpedos that would make me look in the mirror and think really hard about how much I wanted to write and what I was willing to do for it.  I was not quite the same Chris I am today.  I even had crazy long hair and Tony Jaclyn golf clubs.

The event has changed.

Burning Man has changed over the years.  My first year, the tickets were about $150.  The population was still tens of thousands under capacity and everyone was shocked that they reached a population of 25,000. At that time, the event itself was not that far removed from its Ocean Beach roots. People were still impressed that the man was built on a solid structure instead of hay bales. The fireworks show that accompanied the burn was new (first or second year I think). The days of open firearms and "Drive By Shooting" camp where you sped past targets in your car, were recent memories and hadn't yet faded into something that sounds almost like an urban legend today.

There were more chill spaces and fewer sponsored camps. You heard about fewer ridiculous things found in porta potties and you might actually find someone else out there doing their two hours of clean up while you did yours. (These days about 55 of the 65K claim "I do it as I go!" even as they pass by a bit of toilet paper wafting along.) I would get invited into shade structures for cold water, ice cream, a few minutes off my feet, and even "gratitude massages" when I trekked out on Sundays with a bag to gather trash. These days most of the cars leaving don't even bother to slow down as they spray dust into my face.

The cops these days focus on busting people for drugs instead of helping people. It's not unheard of for sexual assault victims to have literally no recourse or resources out there; however, there are multiple, multi-person advanced sting operations to haul off anyone for dealing who might be too high to think not to share their party favors.

There was more fire-dancing and fewer fireworks. More drum circles and fewer drumming base lines on massive speakers. There were more flames and fewer slick LED displays. More nudists and fewer gawkers. More considered art and fewer pieces clearly meant to be enjoyed while rolling balls. More hippies and fewer techies. Sunset brought fire and flashlights and looked less like Disney After Dark. Every other person wasn't dressed to overload some roller's brain with flashy bling or fake fur coats. Giant behemoth art cars in the shape of dragons, submarines, full scale Spanish galleons crawled across the landscape spitting fire and music as impressive as the sound camps. You saw the occasional RV, but most people were still pitching tents. Theme camps with proprietary names hadn't gotten Cease and Desist orders yet for naming themselves after businesses, so the Jiffy Lube camp and the Costco Soulmate Trading Post were still going strong. And I hadn't completely given up on the chance of a blistering, if dusty, threesome.

I didn't even know what a sparkle pony was until my fourth or fifth year. Now they crawl across the landscape like a plague of cute, unprepared locusts.

She's even cooler in person.  Trust me.

This year tickets were $420. (ETA: This year they were as high as $650!) There is every expectation that the population will be near the cap of 60,900 (ETA: 65,000 and it sold out).  Last year the event sold out for the first time ever.

There are almost ten times as many law enforcement officers as the first year I was there. The regulations for cars and camps are much stricter. It's safer, but also more restricted.

They won't even let people have sex out in the open anymore--I mean what's up with THAT?

Beyond the changes you would expect for an event doubling in size and tripling in price, the timber has changed as well. Sure, some of it's me getting older and wanting whippersnappers to get off my lawn.  I just don't have an interest in the drug culture or in drinking like the teens and newly-twenties do. But it's more than that.

It's getting hard to get tickets and even harder to pay for them, and it's changed the feel from a massively inclusive event to a VIP room where only the economically advantaged can afford to play.

There are more tourists every year. (One entire camp consists of people who have paid nearly $10k for a "vacation package" to Burning Man that includes mega swanky RV's, all meals prepared for them, and even an "LSD night" as part of the package.)  They change the feel from participation to "here we are now; entertain us." BM has become less and less the strange blend of art and energy I first fell in love with, and more and more a super happening, exclusive and expensive week-long party–in which, for some reason, people are okay with corrosive dust that gets EVERYWHERE and no plumbing.

So why the hell do I still shlep out there?

One of the things I noticed over the decade is that, as the years went on, I felt like I left the playa with less and less infectious creative energy each year, but feeling more and more centered.  In a way, as a writer, the latter is even better. I don't feel like I've recharged my batteries so much as I feel like my rechargeable batteries (which have been getting less and less from a full charge) have been completely replaced.

Burning Man has become, for me, a period of intense mental and emotional isolation.  So much so that I have to get back in touch with myself and return to all the fountainheads of who I am and what is important to me.  It is so (for lack of a better word) "lonely" out there that I have no one to talk to but me.

If you've ever really talked to yourself–I mean really talked to yourself–you know that you slide through the chit-chat phase pretty quickly.

Obviously I'm never that far from humans. The deepest art safari is only about half a mile from the nearest throng of people, and we camp with wonderful folks who include me in everything they do. My isolation is spiritual and emotional and exists only in a weird metaphorical artsy bullshit kind of way, but I feel it profoundly as soon as I inhale the first lungful of dust.

Welcome home.  You are now alone.  Cope.


-No connection.  Yep, I'm one of them. I check my e-mail several times an hour.  I use Facebook to self-promote so it's pretty much always on. I may be an introvert, but I care intensely about the people in my life and what is going on in their world. When I'm at Burning Man that connection is gone. I think they have cell phone signal at center camp these days, but I don't have a smart phone, so it doesn't really matter. I wouldn't check it if I did. It's good to unplug for at least a few days and remind me that I am basically refreshing obsessively to see what our friends had for lunch and be reminded of everyone's politics.

-No modern conveniences. The closest thing to a McDonalds you're going to find is probably a bar giving away free shots. There is no running water. (Actually there's no water at all except what you bring.) There's no electricity except what is hooked up to generators or battery powered. I have to spend five minutes winding up my hand-crank flashlight to make a midnight bathroom run....to a porta potty (which are probably worth their own whole section). That sense that you can just go pick up anything you want or need fades very quickly out there.

-Life does not naturally exist on the playa.  There are some mountains on each side of the lake bed that have some high desert scrub, a few bugs, jack-rabbits who like to dive in front of cars with a cry of "tellmotherIloveher!", and probably the occasional push-up-crazed lizard, but the playa itself is alkali. Nothing grows in it. Nothing lives in it. It is harsh, unforgiving, barren, and beautiful only in a stark and dangerous way like an apex predator's teeth or talons. Humans, have no business being there, and they will be reminded of that continuously. Okay, technically there's a thirty minute period at dawn and dusk that are mildly pleasant, but mostly I can't possibly forget how far I am from where I physically belong.

-I'm at an unusual age for a burner.  Most people out there are considerably older or younger than me. You get huge chunks of over fifty and under thirty and I'm smack in the middle of those two demographics. Most people my age are punching out hellions or are taking them to see a giant mouse. When you find most of the conversations are about retirement vacations or "dude we were HELLA tripping last night! Oh Em Gee, I am sooooo drunk!" you tend to feel a little like your particular struggles with buying a house or trying to kick off a "real" career aren't the most relatable issues.

-I'm not the physical specimen that most people out there are. Most people at Burning Man are at the upper end of a bell curve of conventionally attractive. This isn't normally a thing I worry about in myself or others, but I feel so different out there that I begin to have a hard time not noticing.

All genders. It makes no difference. They all look like they stepped out of an advertisement for a gym membership. There is so much hawtness, you actually get desensitized to it.  ("Ho hum, garters and stockings. Oiled man-chest. Oh another group in nothing but nighties. ~yawn~ Oh cool a flaming octopus!") Most everyone willing to be (and let's be honest there's some accessibility issues going on there, so also ABLE to be) in the high desert during a week in August is already in pretty good shape, and probably 90% of the people out there have spectacular bodies with smoking muscle definition, and while conventional attractiveness bellwethers are usually a few different flavors of problematic, it makes me all too aware that I do not.

Depending on the groups I'm in, sometimes I can feel mildly in shape, and even appreciate the muscle definition in my upper body.  If I'm standing on a BART platform or walking down the street, I feel sort of average, if a little dumpy. When I walk around on a college campuses, I'm keenly aware that I'm considered overweight. When I'm at Burning Man, I it's palpable.

I think I might see an average body-type over there!

-I'm sober.  Once upon a time, Burning Man probably involved at least one interesting but legally questionable experience in the course of the week, but it hasn't in several years. I don't really drink, so I'm pretty much sober. (I don't eschew these experiences; I just don't spend effort pursuing them.) The fact that a lot of people ONLY experience periods of sobriety because they are aware that they need them to rejuvenate neurotransmitters for their next indulgence means that I am usually surrounded by people in various states of chemically induced goofballery.  That or really bad hangovers. I don't begrudge them their fun, but if you've ever been the designated driver or just been around drunk or high people when you are neither, it can feel a little lonely to not share their altered state of consciousness.

-I'm shy.  I'm always shy–even out in the real world. Painfully so. I burn with the conflict between wanting to talk to you and not wanting to disturb you, and secretly hope you will just say something and end my suffering. But at Burning Man a sizable majority of the people there aren't shy...not even a little, so by comparison I seem to be even shier.

There's a self-selection bias involved in the kinds of people who want to shlep out into some of the most inhospitable territory on Earth to have a 168 hour party. They are gregarious extroverts, most of them and they're feeding off each other's energy. While most of those 60,000 people are getting their social-fu on, I'm cursing the fact that I'm a social-fu white belt and the idea of saying hi makes me want to burst into shyflame. Every once in a while, I find someone who is overwhelmed by all the stimulation, extroverted enough to talk to even the wallflower, or genuinely curious about what I'm writing, and who is willing to have the kind of conversation I can really get into, and we usually have some kind of AMAZING discussion about art or politics or something.

....but that is a very rare event. And it happens less often than it used to.

-I don't look the part.  You think the one place on Earth people wouldn't judge you for how you look might be an event with thousands of people actively trying to subvert mainstream culture and its demand for conformity.

You'd be wrong.

There is a culture at Burning Man that is as prevalent as the culture back in the real world.  It's just different. It demands conformity to its unspoken rules just as much as our culture does--it just does so about different things. There are groups (clans if you will) that do not get along (industrial artists, "hardcore" campers, flower power hippies, ravers, and such) and if you don't fit easily into one of these categories, you can make people just a tiny bit uncomfortable when they can't peg your faction. And the people there–as expansive and open-minded as they usually are–can be just as intolerant when it comes to the Burning Man cultural conventions.

I'm not talking about ignoring the precepts of the entire event. I'm talking about not looking and acting like everyone else.

Expressing yourself radically apparently applies to Utilikilts, lingerie, and public intoxication but not to Hawaiian shirts it would seem. At least a couple of times every year someone takes one look at me and assumes it's my frist year. They sometimes even get a little snarky about my dress, especially if they don't realize I'm wearing socks and shoes due largely to my outrageous dry skin issues and with absolutely no premeditation to offend their delicate sensibilities about not being barefoot and free. I don't bother pointing out the irony of being you-don't-fit-in judgmental at an event largely focused on non-conformity, but I do enjoy it when they discover I've been coming for two, three, four, even five times longer than they have. (ETA: Might hit six this year!) 

-I'm not the right kind of artist.  I feel deeply and have passion and all that shit, but I don't express it in the normal playa ways. I trundle around with my Moleskine journal and a mechanical pencil and spend almost the whole time I'm there taking notes or just writing. But Burning Man is a place of performance art and sculpture. It is a place for fire dancers and people with flamethrowers attached to their cars. For the gregarious folks with wild costumes and LED wire who feed off each other's exuding energy. It's not a place for mousy little writers, quietly scribbling away.

In its own words even it fosters "spontaneous acts of artistry" (which 90% of the time bear a striking resemblance to "drunk people being goofy in packs."). There are a thousand things at any given moment competing for your attention (including people trying to hook up that have so much fucking game they could be sold on Steam for $59.99). The quiet guy writing in the corner is, if anything, even more inconspicuous than in the real world seeing as how much other stimulation is readily available and how many people are turned up to 11 in body and spirt out there.

I'm just not the right kind of artist.

Last year I saw a guy painting with acrylics at the temple, and we spent perhaps an hour talking about what it was like to have art styles that were atypical to the playa. His experiences were largely similar. He loved the creative energy, but had a distinct awareness that he was not the right "type" of artist for the Burning Man culture.

No one goes "WOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAHH! That is so TIGHT!" about a short story draft I'm working on.

On the best of days in the real world, I feel alone in a crowd.  I love people and I love all their quirky little foibles, but I always sort of feel like I'm on the outside looking in. ("I love you all, but I do not belong with any of you for long.") Out there everything is magnified. I feel as if I have been plucked completely out of the world, or at best that I am moving through it like a shade. Everything in that environment seems to serve to sequester me on every meaningful level from those standing right in front of me.

I am cloistered within the crowd.

I guess tonight the lone wolf hunts alone.

This might sound awful, and it can be. (Or it might just sound pretentious and it definitely is.) But it is also wonderful. It's like the pain that lances an abscess or the agonizing explosion of a shoulder's rotator ball popping back into its socket. Like everything else out there, the extremeness of the duality brings both into relief. Just as my soul is feasting as my physical body is having the worst time of its life, so too does the isolation serve my spirit.

Which is not as corny and artsy-fartsy as it sounds. At least not when you're standing in the middle of it and experiencing it.

All these things are why it becomes such a period of rejuvenation for me.  There is so much stimulation going on all the time with lights and music and energy, but in a way, I'm in a kind of sensory deprivation tank. Out in the middle of nowhere with flat, cracked land stretching out for what feels like forever, all but invisible to everyone else, and looking at some strange piece of art is where the distractions fade away, and the mindless chatter of online debates and "have you checked your e-mail" and banal conversations and politics and religion and that hum of sexism and racism and it all fades into a distant thump like bass on an art car a mile off, and I discover there's nothing I can distract myself with except those fundamental questions we all usually try our hardest never to have to answer.  "Who are you?" I ask me. "What do you want?" "Why are you here?  What do you actually care about?"

"Why do you create?"

I don't walk away from the playa with "ideas" anymore--not really. I used to bubble over with plans for next year, story ideas, and plans to dress up like a fairy and deliver one-ply to the needy porta-potties (or something), but not so much anymore. Now when I walk away from the playa, I have something different. I have a renewed sense of identity and purpose. Like somewhere between the unforgiving environment and the austere loneliness I have shed my skin like a snake and my soul has emerged looking vibrant an new. I slough off the bullshit and I return to the real world more me than I was when I left.

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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.

Myriad As a Noun?

We also require all our authors write only "missives"
instead of letters, and ask everyone how the 
"day/afternoon/evening finds them"
instead of just saying hi.
It's a small price to pay to have a
"Simply The Best"/"You're The Best" mashup
play over the P.A. system whenever one of
our writers walks into the clubhouse.

Yes, Virginia, you CAN use myriad as a noun! (And not just like that.)  

I love The New Yorker. I do. Though I especially their weekly offering of short fiction, TNY helps me look like I eruditely understand the nuance and complexity of news in a world where most people's current events awareness comes from Facebook macros (posted by an insular bubble of their friends...who haven't blocked or been blocked by them....as part of an algorithm that shows you more of what you "like.") The New Yorker offers smart writing and good journalism.

However, sometimes The New Yorker is on the "chic" side of linguistic kerfuffles lest their reputation for being the biggest ponces in periodic literature be endangered. The apparently react to the accusation that linguistic elitism is classist (and often racist) by hopping into their Audis and driving off to play tennis. Their recent very noticeable scourge of any forms of myriad as a noun is a pretty good example. Every issue has myriad incidences of the word only ever as an adjective, even though as Merriam-Webster attests, there are a myriad of precedents for its use as either noun or adjective:

"Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase 'a myriad of,' seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective.... however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English."

Maybe they're all too busy sipping brandy in the cloakroom to bother investigating the actual origins of their snobbery. Or maybe they know that they are just SO. FUCKING. GOOD! at print journalism (in a world where it is very nearly dead) that we just won't be able to quit them, no matter how eccentric and anachronistic they become.

My myriad proclivities are redeemed. (See what I did there?)

Or as I say when I'm NOT reading The New Yorker: "Neener neener!"

My Name is Chris, And I Use Two Spaces

Worst character defect ever.
Bigotry. Sexism. Genocide.
Nothing compares.

I have a deep, dark confession to make. Some of you probably already have noticed this vast and personal failing, but to those who have not, I assure you, I am not attempting to get away with anything. I will lay it all bare.

My mother taught me to type when I was six. What I didn't learn from her, I learned in my high school keyboarding class in 1993. We still used typewriters back in those ancient days of yore. It was a different time--a time of innocence. Back when sending troops to Iraq was new and fresh and not the tired cliche of today. A time before computers and automatic formatting.

Before the dark times.

Before The Empire.

Yes, by now, you probably know the deep horror to which I'm about to admit.

I am not a good person. I am flawed...frail...all too human. But the brightest lamp among my glaring faults is that I sometimes use two spaces after punctuation. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I learned skills and reinforced them day after day for years--decades. Who knew that we would end up with auto-formatting computers? We were just happy back then to not have to run from saber toothed tigers on our way to school.

As you can see from Farhad Manjoo this is an ugly error, and according to Damian Thomson it is an atrocity. I had hoped it would be enough in my life not to commit genocide or become a serial killer.

But I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

Of course, like most such arguments, there are huge camps, debating even the very history surrounding the controversy. Lines were drawn. A typographical civil war rages with brother pitted against brother. There is a side out there that agrees with me makes pathetic excuses to justify my moral failing.

But I have no illusions that the two-spacers are morally depraved to their space bar tapping cores and on the wrong side of history. And so I can only ask you for your humble forgiveness that I am a human who has such a horrific and terrible practice ingrained deep within me as habit. I can only ask your clemency and mercy when I stray.

When I falter.

I am pretty good when I pay attention, and getting better, but when my fingers are flying, sometimes...I don't think about the hurt they can cause until it's already too late. I forget about the suffering. I don't think of the children.

I am weak. Please forgive me.

The Trouble With Short Stories

"What are you dying to write," Janusprof asked me.  

My answer blurted out immediately, before I'd even consciously thought of it. "Longer things. Novels. Series."

"That's not an answer!" he insisted. "I mean what do you really want to write?"

I knew what he wanted. He wanted some touchy-feely internal conflict that had torn my soul apart and drawn me to the blank page. He wanted my "true" pain or some artistic cliché. I probably could have given him a shlocky answer like "redemption" and talked about how many of my stories explore someone struggling to be good when they don't even really know what that means. That would have given him a fine-arts boner.

Unfortunately, he didn’t really get how genuine my answer was.

The pedagogy of most writing programs seems to focus on this imaginary "true" reason that a writer is dying to write. It’s born of a “high-art” ideal about the nature of inspiration and expression and what “counts” and what doesn’t (and seems to be the reason that most MFA programs produce a laughably huge outpouring of literature about the horror of white, middle-class childhoods with mild drug experimentation).

Because, you know...that's pretty edgy.

Somewhere along the line, while the “high-art” instructors are wringing out their souls for inspiration, passing judgment on what isn’t art (perhaps with the scathing invective of “popular”), and excusing the fact that they spend an inordinate amount of time focused on what to write instead of how to write it because they are "academics in the school of humanities," they forget that most students attend college to learn a marketable skill set—not to be molded into a cookie cutting of the same bourgeoisie aesthetic and told what to enjoy.

The real fuck of it is that the question could possibly have been a valuable one from one in the position of mentor. It was clearly the sort of Dead Poets Society, search-your-soul moment he was gong for. But those only actually work if said mentor does not have a predetermined sort of answer in mind. Janusprof obviously did.

I, in stark contrast, was being quite reflective and sincere when I said it. I learned something about myself in the alacrity of my answer, whether he approved or not.

The short story is the format that is most convenient both for reading and writing in college. It fits tidily into a classroom structure. If you take on a novel, it has to be a big chunk of your curriculum, and writing something longer would take an entire semester. So when the lessons are coming once a week, the realistic format to work with is the short story. If the students want to take the tools they learn into something that goes beyond the scope of 45 hours of lecture, they can.

It's not a bad thing, mind. Most writers (including me) could stand to learn how to be concise rather than verbose. And I appreciate the short story as an art form probably more than the next guy—unless I happen to be standing next to a Pushcart editor or something. It just suffers from being convenient. Short stories also tend to be the medium of foot-in-the-door in traditional publishing. A few short story publishing accolades will get your manuscript a more considered look by an agent. At the time I did not know I would be passionate about non-traditional publishing, so I figured more short stories were in my future.

But what calls to me, what I yearn for—both in reading and in writing—is longer works. That is my inner fucking urge, and everyone hoping that my step-dad diddled me or that my teenage angst at being a D&D nerd cut me to the quick of my soul is just going to have to be fucking disappointed.

I love reading novels. I can’t even remember a time when I would feel the girth of thick books and marvel at their potential to suspended me within another world for as long as possible. I didn't want to read a book so much as crawl inside them and be someone else for as long as possible.

Perhaps not quite that thick...

I read Gone With the Wind before I had acne, just because it was the thickest book I could find in the A.E. Wright middle school library. I gathered cans from around town for two days to scrounge up the money to purchase Stephen King’s It, mostly because I was aware that it clocked in at over a thousand pages. I even tried my hand at War and Peace just because its heft felt so....comforting to me—although I must admit that one never got finished. My principle complaint with my Kindle is that I can’t hold a book like 1Q84 and feel its heft against my palms.

I particularly enjoyed series books. I could stay in a world and with a character for weeks. More than once I blew months worth of allowance on a run of novels because I’d enjoyed the first and I wanted (needed?) to be able to pick a new one up as soon as I was done with the old. No interruption was acceptable.

It is then, with Ben Stein caliber lack of shock, that I discover my proclivity toward writing the same.

I imagine full and developed arcs based on childhood books and movies, and sometimes even picture epic quests that I cannot tell outside of a trilogy (or more). One of my bucket list works (writers bucket lists don’t involve places they should go; they involve things they should write) is an epic high fantasy chronicle that sits firmly ensconced in my head that would be no less than five or six volumes.

I was always “writing books” from about nine or ten on. I sent more trees to their doom commandeering notebooks and legal pads in order to begin some opus or another on than I will ever admit to a nature conservationist. In high school, my successes and my failures finishing manuscripts all began as "novels." It never even occurred to me to write a short story outside of an English assignment.

When I got into college, I wrote a lot of stuff I didn’t want to write including essays on the effect of nonoxynol nine on latex and fifty page research papers on "the model minority," but I always brought my "A game" and wrote my heart out  because I figured every lesson that put a tool in my toolbox was a lesson worth having as a writer. If I was going to stop working a "real job" in my thirties to give that much time and effort to something, I was bloody going to suck the marrow out of it. I even worked around the “no genre” pedagogy with nothing but an eye-roll. I wanted to be there. Bad.

However, whenever I read a successful writer's advice almost all say some variant of the following: write what you would want to read. 

Forget the snobby lit sommeliers that haunt the Humanities buildings of college campuses and concern themselves with how “literary” a work isn’t, uttering phrases like “worthy of fiction” in a way that makes it clear they are imminently qualified to determine such things. Forget the promotional guru who has come up with a Venn diagram outlining various demographics and where the most “accessible” story possible would be located. Ignore the well-intentioned family members who tell that you should totally do a book just like Harry Potter/Twilight/Da Vinci Code/Whatever’s Selling Like Mad. Ignore them all.

Write what you would want to read.  

Word!

For me, that is books, trilogies, epics. I want to create worlds. I want to make people regret turning that last page like they would regret saying good-bye to an old friend.

Janusprof shook his head and turned away from me. In his mind, I had failed. I was Luke and I just couldn't get the X-wing out of the swamp. He paid a lot more attention to his nachos after that. His replies became curt.

I found it enlightening, personally. My answer was firm and immediate. It came out of me almost before the question was finished, burbling up from some place that didn’t even have time to mull it on a surface level. My gut knew something I didn’t. I don’t think, until he asked me that question, if I knew just how much I was really tired of being forced into the square pegs of short stories or how much I really yearned to get back to some of the unpolished and half-finished manuscripts and even some new stuff that had bubbled to the surface over the years I was stuck in school.

He reminded me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place.

[This article has been revised from an earlier version. If you are interested in the original, you can find it here.]