Edits and Experiences

I know quite a few writers who loathe the editing process.  For them it is something akin to a mammogram or a prostate exam; an unfortunate, embarrassing, and painful necessity that they put off for as long as they can.  

I, on the other hand, have never felt this way.  Editing has always felt to me like visiting an old, dear friend whom I haven't seen in a good long while.  We start on the familiar subjects, then veer off into new areas, then back again.  Editing is a conversation, one where I do a lot more listening than talking.

I'm doing a major rewrite on The Curious Snowflake right now, and I'm finding the entire process fascinating.  Here's this odd little bird of a story that always insisted on being in the style of a picture book, but when I said, "now listen, we have to turn you into a chapter book", she was like "okay then, well when I went here, this happened..." and off we go, nearly as effortless as it was when I first wrote her back in 2008.  Occasionally my Critic (obnoxious bastard that he is) has stuck his head rudely into the middle of the conversations with his doubts and perfectionisms, but TCS shoos him off like he's a rude puppy begging for scraps at the table.  Perhaps that's why I love her so.  I am a born listener and she's always been able to carry the conversation.  :-)

Editing TCS is also a major shift in gears for me.  Ever since early February when a wonderful email conversation with Allie Burke of Stigma Fighters (look her and them up!) on the nature of schizophrenia finally broke my writer's block, I've been going great guns on Children of Dusk. Shifting from YA urban fantasy to spiritual allegory generates more than a little creative whiplash, but there are some interesting parallels.  There's a bit of Curious Snowflake in Vee Melan, and First Flake shines through in both Daniel Lum and Kieran, and the other judgmental flakes certainly mirror Tim's high school experience, with its cliques and pettiness.  Many writers, including ones I admire like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, really do write one story over and over in different ways and with different perspectives.  Perhaps that is because we really have only one story, our own, and we just come up with different ways to tell it.

JCS

The Benefits of a Community

The entire process and identity of "author" is changing.  Gone are the days of Dickinson, Kafka, and Lovecraft, writers who labored in obscurity, sequestered from the world other than a few close friends and relatives, and only recognized by the world post mortem because of pure luck, loyalty of a few devotees, and Fate.  Anyone in the 21st century who tries this is dooming themselves to the dustbin. It is easier than ever to become "published", but because of this there are more and more books and stories available to the public and therefore far more competition.  Writers can no longer be islands if they want to be authors.

 So what do we, the writers who wish to take the next step in this age of hybrid publishing, ebooks, and social media, need to do?  The key is community.  When I mentioned competition before, that might make us think that community might run counter to becoming a professional author.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The difference is that the competition is not between the authors and for the opportunities, but between the communities and for the visibility.  This idea that authors need to compete with each other is a holdover from the 20th century, where big publishing houses, mass distribution, and (moment of silence) physical bookstores dominated.  Today is different.  Competition between authors is a meaningless concept when any reader who hears about some new hot author can pull a device out of their pocket, spend a measly three bucks, and be reading in 5 minutes.  Visibility is key, and groups are always more visible than individuals.  So if one author discovers another, they should embrace the newbie with open arms, because every new person increases the reach of the community.

I don't claim to be some sort of maven about all this.  I am the noob, the person still searching and creating his community.  What I have so far is small.  I have a few old dear friends, writers I have known for a decade or more, and a few new faces, people that I have connected with through the magic of social media.  But I recognize the need, the dynamic, the benefit of community.  Hopefully I can put it to good use.

JCS
2/8/15

Empty Things: A Poem

Empty Things


I have this odd obsession with empty things.
Blank notebooks, satchels, wooden boxes,
their potentialities tug at my sleeve, clear their throats, demand my attention.

"Fill us," they say.

In a box I place:
a silver dime
a baby tooth
a handcuff key
a bullet.

In a satchel I place:
a deck of cards
a physics text
an unfinished story
a specific pen.

In a notebook I write:
a scarred boy
a God idea
a drop of pain
a thousand snippets.

These are for myself for now,
so I close my empty things and make promises to come back.

Do I keep them?  Sometimes.


JCS
2/4/15

HIndsight Is Not Always 20/20

I have 3 literary works that I am currently devoting energy to.  First, obviously, is TCS.  Second is my WIP, Children of Dusk.  The third is a longer philosophical piece I finished and then shelved about 3 years ago called A Theory of Oneness.  For years I'd wanted to put down on paper a sort of step-by-step explanation of my basic philosophy and how I defend it to myself, and I finally did so during the Spring and Summer of 2012.  I had originally planned for it to be a multipart work, covering theory, implementation, and result of my ideas, but it stalled after the first part.  My new plan was to dust it off, revise it, talk it up, and put it up on Amazon.  So a couple of days ago I dug out that old green notebook (my first drafts are always longhand) and started reading.

Hoo boy.

I knew it was rough, but I didn't expect this; 50-odd pages of meanderings, tangents, and horribly overwrought (overwritten?) sentence structure.  If it were all crap, that would be fine, I'd just junk it, sigh, and move on, but there are some gems in there, and the process of writing it was very important to me.  Putting one's life ideas down on paper is very cathartic, because it forces you to stare unblinking at your own inconsistencies and contradictions.  Writing Theory of Oneness really made me formalize, codify, and justify my ideas. 

But holy hell, this is going to be a lot of work.

Genesis of a Snowflake Part 2

So there TCS sat for about 4 years, simmering away in my subconscious, not completely forgotten but not even vaguely on my radar until a birthday present brought it back with a vengeance. 

For 2 1/2 years I had an 80+ mile daily commute, a long, lonely, and incredibly boring drone up and back Interstate 80 five times a week (and don't get me started on the gas costs).  My lovely wife knew this, so for my 35th birthday she bought me a nice stereo for my car and paid to have it professionally installed.  One of the neat features of this stereo was its ability to play burnt MP3 CD-ROMs.  Not a fabulous feature in this day of iPods and smart phones, but one that appealed to me because of a quirk of an old job of mine.  I once worked in the Interlibrary Loan department of one of the biggest libraries in the Chicago area, and nearly every new CD that the library added to their collection went through my hands (this was around 2003, back when CDs were still a thing).  So I would snag any CD that held any appeal for me, bring it home, rip it onto my computer, and then bring it back and send it on its merry way.  Over time I accumulated a massive library of music, far more than any early-2000s computer could hold, so I started archiving them onto disc.  Now you understand the appeal of a car stereo that could read MP3 discs.

During my digital excavations, I came across some audiobooks I had copied during my library tenure, so I started working through those as a change of pace.  Lo and behold, I find audio versions of Neale Donald Walsch's  Conversations With God books.  I'd read the books themselves once, and found them interesting but, at the time, a bit esoteric for my tastes.  I decided to give them another shot and fell in love.  Part of this was because in the intervening 7 years or so my personal philosophy had matured considerably, part was because the production was excellent.  Walsch himself reads his own parts with Ed Asner and Ellen Burstyn alternately taking the voice of God, Asner's gravel contrasting wonderfully with Burstyn's mellow contralto.  I can't recommend them enough.

In any case, I dove wholeheartedly into the series, and what did I find about 2/3rds of the way through Book 1 but my old friend, the snowflake-as-soul metaphor.  All of a sudden, TCS came soaring out of the back burner of my mind with a big old DONE on it, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck like a lion attacking a gazelle, and informed me in no uncertain terms that I would begin writing it.  NOW.

Never before and never since has an idea consumed me the way TCS did.  My lovely wife told me after the fact that I was impossible to live with during the writing process because I was utterly and completely somewhere else.  I knocked the first draft out in 9 days, and over that time I did nothing but write, think about writing, and (no joke) dream about writing.  I suppose I worked, cooked meals, functioned as a human being, but all I remember of that week and a half is an unprecedented obsession, a complete mania. 

I believe with all my heart that creativity is not a process of bringing something new into the world, but a process of bringing something through from a higher plane of consciousness.  In my moments of clearest and best creative power, I feel like nothing so much as a conduit, a pipeline, a scribe taking dictation.  From what?  I could conjecture, I suppose, but anything I could call it would be just a label.  The Muse, God, the Great Creator, an angel sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear (or in the case of TCS, screaming it's little feathered head off), it doesn't matter.  All I know is that my creativity comes through me, not from me.  I am, to quote Paul, not the Potter, nor the Potter's wheel, but the Potter's clay.  Sexist bastard with an ego to crush a mountain, but he had his moments.  :-P

TCS, in its form found on Amazon, is 97% exactly as it came through me in those frantic 9 days in March of 2010.  I made a few grammatical adjustments, tweaked a word here or there, but all they were was polish on a few facets of the gem.  I go back once or twice a year to reread TCS, just to reassure myself that I am not delusional, I am not a raving egotist, that it really is as good as I remember it being, as I remember it becoming.  Each time, I am filled with awe and gratitude that I was capable of bringing it into being as well as I did.  I am not proud of TCS.  I am humbled by it.

JCS

Genesis of a Snowflake

In my 20+ years as a writer, the experience of bringing The Curious Snowflake to life was the most unique.  No other idea ever came to me in this way, no other idea stayed with me so long before finally coming to fruition, and no other idea devoured me so completely once I started it. 

Most of my ideas are visual or auditory, not conceptual.  When I get the itch to write something, it usually starts with an image or a conversation in my head.  Some of these bounce around once in my noggin and then disappear, but the good ones stay, rattling around like marbles in a bucket until I get them out and put them on paper.  TCS was different.  It started out as an idea rather than image or dialogue, or more accurately, it began as two ideas that collided, one from my childhood an another from my spiritual readings.

My mother is a very unique woman, as anyone who has met her can attest.  She always believed in challenging me intellectually and never dumbed anything down for me.  The place where this was most evident was in her choices in my childhood literature.  Yes, I got the typical staples, Seuss and such, but from a very young age my mother also read to me from the Bible and from books of poetry and classic literature.  I enjoyed these immensely (loved the plagues of Egypt story as a kid) but one of my absolute favorites was a collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling (best known for writing The Jungle Book) called The Just So Stories.  These were stories written by Kipling that he read aloud to his own daughter, whom he refers to throughout the collection as his Best Beloved.  The stories are universally charming, but the one I liked the best was one called The Elephant's Child.  It is the story of a young elephant who "was full of 'satiable curiosity, which means he asked ever so many questions" who then goes on a journey to discover what crocodiles have for breakfast.  Needless to say, this almost ends disastrously for the Elephant's Child. 

The second idea is one familiar to anyone who reads New Age literature, the image of souls as snowflakes.  My basic life philosophy is pantheistic; I believe that All Is One, appearing separate and linear for the purpose of creating experience.  Souls as snowflakes is a perfect parallel to this concept.  All snowflakes are made from the same thing, and yet every snowflake is unique because the possible variations is equal to the number of individual water molecules in the flake factorialized.  For you non-math people out there, that would be S times (S -1) times (S - 2)  and so on all the way down to 1.  So mathematically speaking, even considering the millions of snowflakes that fall in each snowstorm on Earth, the amount of time it would take for an exact replica of a snowflake to appear is longer than the age of the universe, and that's assuming that all snowflakes have exactly the same number of water molecules in them, which they obviously don't. 

Anyway, math nerding-out aside, the ideas of souls as snowflakes and the dangers and wonders of curiosity coexisted in my mind for many years until one day about 8 years ago.  I'd been on one of my spiritual reading kicks at the time, and I was cleaning out the bedroom my wife and I share in anticipation for the birth of our daughter.  Lo and behold, I come across the old copy of the Just So Stories my mother had given me when our oldest was born.  I sat down on the bed and started thumbing through it (I am one of the world's greatest procrastinators) and I come across The Elephant's Child.  Suddenly these two ideas collide in my head and the idea of The Curious Snowflake, a spiritual children's parable was born.  I rummaged around in the bedroom until I found a spiral notebook and pen (not difficult, I keep some in every room, which drives my DW nuts) and start writing.

I get about a page in and the idea died.  Utterly.  But it still itched at me, so I filed it away in the back of my head and forgot about it.  It stayed there, simmering away, for about 4 years.

More later.

Welcome Home, Beloved

Hello my friends,

It's been almost 3 years since I've used this blog, but since I have rededicated myself to TCS, I figured it was time for me to dust this old thing off and start using it again.  I will try to post something about once a week.

I do not know how it is for other creatives, but for me the whole process is about momentum.  As long as I keep creating, keep working, keep coming to the page and putting something on it, I'm okay.  The moment I lapse, everything calcifies.  I was going great guns on my WIP, Children of Dusk, for about 2 months, then a combination of work, stress, and a little videogame called Destiny pulled me away from it, and I've barely written 10 pages in the last 3 months.  Every time I went to the page, it felt like I was constipated.  The ideas were there, but they wouldn't come together.  Just yesterday, I finally got things moving again, but I don't know how long I can maintain the focus with it being December and all. 

Does anyone else have problems like this?

JCS