Tag Archives: the writing life

A guest post by Guy Anthony De Marco

Every so often, I travel out to a new convention with my talented and lovely wife, Tonya. We normally drive our commercial van so we can transport our stock, shelving, banners, and boxes of books for authorly friends who are flying out. Tonya and I discuss plots, books, business, and have a grand time.

The first “new” con this year was RadCon in Pasco, Washington. This trip featured me singing 1980’s hits in my Arnold Schwarzenegger accent. You haven’t really experienced Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” until you’ve heard Arnie belting it out. I drove the 16-hour trip straight through with a couple of stops for fuel (body and vehicle), and to torture my poor wife’s eardrums.

Radcon supports a local project that has some of their guests traveling to local schools to talk to students. Elizabeth Vann-Clark, the con-chair, asked me to speak to the children at Chief Joseph Middle School in Richmond because of my technology background. Since I used to teach information technology at a couple of colleges, I agreed without hesitation. Elizabeth noted that many students don’t have an opportunity to discuss technology-based careers, which is why she started the program.

I met with the technology teacher, who introduced me and a fellow Radcon author to his classes. Most of the questions dealt with technology, but about a quarter were questions concerning writing genre fiction. The most popular question, with several follow-ups, was “How much money do you make?” and “How much money do you have?” I was a little more forthcoming about what I earned, noting the technology field was supporting my family while I worked on my novels and stories. I also noted that I travel around the country, going to conventions and talking with new or potential authors.

The experience was a positive one, and should I be invited back, I would be quite happy to visit the school again.

Writing is usually a solitary endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. Commiserating a rejection with fellow authors or answering questions for folks just getting into writing at a convention can be a very rewarding experience. Don’t shut yourself out by locking yourself in your office space. Interacting can not only help others, but it can help you when you’re working on a new project. Some questions may actually jog your brain into gear, firing up the virtual muse in your head.

One of the best stories I tell along this line came from an experience at OSFest. A group of Denver-based authors, including Fictorian contributor Quincy J. Allen, traveled to Omaha for the first time. The author track was a new addition, and there were a group of attendees who were just starting the path to publication. One of them was Sarah Whittaker, who showed up to almost all of our panels. We also chatted with her outside of panels during the con, and Quincy and I told her she should have something published by the next OSFest convention.

The following year, we saw Sarah with her new novel, The Raggedyman, available in print and ebook. I have to admit, I was quite proud that she followed through. I made sure to buy a signed print copy from her. Watching someone you helped succeed, no matter how small you think your contribution was, will always give you a smile.

I’m sure there were folks who encouraged or mentored you, formally or otherwise. It’s time you paid that gift forward.

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia, GuyAndTonya.com, and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

Solitude – A Lonely Gift

December 19, 2013

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Author's Perspective Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life Work-Life Balance 2 Comments

Imagine being alone in a cabin, writing without being disturbed by anyone and without a cell phone or internet. The basics are there – plumbing, electricity and a land-line phone for emergencies. The cabin is as cozy warm as the ability to remember to stoke the old wood stove. Sitting in the comfiest recliner, laptop propped on the lap, flying fingers blurt out vivid scenes. You write, you sleep, you go for the occasional walk to clear your head or to work out a problem and then you begin again. Word count rises and spirit soars.

This was the greatest gift I ever gave myself – a whole month of writing, thinking and sleeping. Beyond the accomplishment of a story told, it transformed my understanding of what I need to be a writer.

We try to balance our writing life with our everyday lives which includes work, family, friends and fun in our marvelous technological society. These things are important yet equally important is the need for time to think, create and write. So we plan and eek out snippets of writing time – an hour here, an hour there, a workshop here and a two day retreat there – and we write. Yet, as important as those snippets of time are, they are not solitude for solitude is immersion without expectation of interruption or immediate cessation.

Solitude provides the luxury to explore, think and integrate. Sometimes it isn’t the word count that’s required but the ability to think, brainstorm and plot without distraction. The balance now is that I create opportunities for solitude (even if it’s half a day) and the results of being centered, free-flowing creativity and the calm from problems solved spill into those precious snippets of writing time.

On that month-long journey of solitude, I discovered that in order to achieve solitude I must walk down the path of desperate loneliness where there are no people, no events, no media – nothing exists but me and my thoughts. Junk-noise and junk-thought withdrawal can be a painful albeit rewarding experience. Now I make a conscientious effort to shut out the junk-noise and junk-thought. Yes, people aren’t happy when I don’t respond to texts or phone calls for hours but they aren’t writing my stories and the unplanned interactions dissolve the state of mind I need to be in.

I never wrote so much so quickly and I never slept as much before! The experience made me aware how exhausting the creative process is. After writing for hours, I’d inhale some food and collapse into a stone-dead nine hour sleep and then do it all over again. So sometimes when I’m reluctant to write it’s because I know I don’t have the energy it takes to be fully engaged nor do I have the time to allow the grey cells to warm up to enough to integrate ideas before creating a coherent symphony of words. Now, I’m a little more forgiving of myself in those moments and I work hard to make sure the time and the energy I need are there.

Solitude allows the brain to become more sensitive to the emotional tenor of words, to the rhythms of not only speech but of story pacing – it’s the crescendo and denouement of action and reaction, heightened and relaxed emotion, the interaction of protagonist and antagonist, the prose of world building mingling with characters experiencing the dynamics of the world. Having an extended experience of the rhythm of words, images and scenes, and having done it long enough to integrate it, I go back into that state when I write. For me, it’s meditation through writing.

I always thought that solitude was the ideal writing state and had dreamed of being sequestered in a cabin writing forever. Not anymore. Surrounding ourselves with family and friends, experiencing life, those are the things that are fodder for our creative selves. We are creatures of the pack and loneliness in the extreme can as easily erode our ability to write as can the distractions. Balancing solitude and writing with family and friends – that’s what I need. I’ll take my month of solitude again and I’ll keep finding small blocks of it in the meantime. But, I’ll also cherish my time with family and friends for solitude works best when we have something to leave and go back to again!

Happy writing!

Those Who Came Before

May 17, 2013

David Carrico

Author's Perspective Reviews The Writing Life No Comments

I’ve said in previous Fictorian blogs that I’ve been both an omnivorous and a ravenous reader since as far back as I can remember. Oddly enough, though, as I’ve also previously mentioned, I was never someone who knew at an early age that I was going to be a writer. I’m not sure why, other than I remember being tremendously in awe of anyone who could write a whole book, and never dreamed that I could do that.

I did, however, begin wishing that I could write a book. And I can tell you exactly when it happened. In early 1963 I was in 6^th grade in a school on Ben Eielson Air Force Base, just south of Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Scholastic Book Program was in full swing by then, and every month or so a brochure would come out listing books we could order. I think it was in January that one listing in the brochure caught my eye. It had an intriguing descriptive blurb, an intriguing title-Catseye-and a cool cover.

It was by Andre Norton, whom I’d never heard of before, but that was okay-I hadn’t heard of a lot of authors. I checked the space for it on the order form, and waited.

The day that it arrived, I brought the book home, plopped myself on my bed, opened the cover, and found myself lost in a strange and amazing new universe.

I had just encountered my first real science fiction. Eleanor Cameron’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and Edward Eager’s Half Magic, charming though they were, lost me to a universe of interstellar civilizations, space travel, warfare, telepathy, sapient animals, and aliens. To this day, if I’m asked the “you’re alone on a desert island and you can only have the books of one author” question, Norton would be a finalist in my short list.

Andre Norton was actually Alice Mary Norton. She began writing at a time when it was very difficult for women authors to be taken seriously, and she used the standard tactic of the time to overcome that problem-she adopted a pseudonym. She actually used at least three over her career, but almost all of her output was published under Andre Norton. Bibliography She did eventually legally change her name to Andre Alice Norton.

Norton was a superlative story teller, and had a gift for creating characters that even today I connect with. Whether it was space opera, or earthbound adventure, or historical fiction, or fantasy, a book by her sucked me in. I would read by flashlight at night in order to finish a book after bedtime. And it was her work, first and foremost, that lit in me not the desire to write, but the wish that I could write like that.

Of course, once I found real science fiction, I started hunting for as much of it as I could find. The libraries on the base had some, and I found Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, and a lot more. But the only other author who grabbed me like Norton did at that age-the only other author who resonated with me like Norton-was Robert A. Heinlein.

Both writers plotted gripping stories. Both could write very taut fiction that moved at a fast pace, yet had depth and characterization.

Both writers excelled at writing “coming of age” stories, which even today is probably the single most popular plot form in the young adult market.

It would be hard to find two better exemplars of novel writing for either adult or young adult markets.

But at that age, that wasn’t part of my thinking. I learned from them by osmosis, as I dove into their books again and again and again, reading and re-reading ad infinitum but never ad nauseam. And both of them, more than any other writers at the time, fueled that wish that I could be a writer.

To pick a work from each that connected with me very strongly, take Catseye from Norton and Between Planets by Heinlein.

Both are coming of age stories. Both are not routine run-of-the-mill plots. And both are not “talk-down-to-the-kids” stories. Both include violence and death. Toward the end of his book, Heinlein’s protagonist is asked to man a “dead-man switch”-to commit suicide, in other words-to ensure that a space vessel is destroyed rather than captured if a battle doesn’t go their way. In Norton’s book, her protagonist is offered the return of a family treasure and heritage for which he has longed all his life, but only at a monumental and deadly price.

I can’t describe to you the impact those two novels had on me. I literally cannot communicate the feelings I had when I finished each one of them, the least of which was, “Oh, wow.”

But with each reading and re-reading of books by these two masters of their craft, that wish that I could write grew, until finally, sixteen years after I opened the cover to Catseye the first time, it became a desire to write, and I first set pen to paper-literally. It has been a long road since then to where I am as a writer today, and it’s one I don’t think I would have walked without the influence of Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein.

Thank you both.

In the Spirit of the Season

December 24, 2012

David Carrico

Doing Good in the World Life Philosophies The Writing Life 2 Comments

This is a very different article than I had planned to post. As I write this, it is the day after a very unsane (as opposed to insane) young man named Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and started shooting people. By the time he was done, eight adults and twenty children were dead, including himself. I have not been as horrified by one man’s actions since the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. My stomach still churns in nausea. What Lanza did was just evil. No other word applies.

Yeah, I know, that’s kind of a heavy thought with which to begin a Christmas blog.

Christmas is associated with Jesus Christ. The very name is a reference to him. And regardless of your beliefs or feelings about the person of Jesus Christ, you have to admit that he was (and still is) one of the less than a handful of people who truly affected the lives of people and tribes and nations all over the world for well-nigh 2000 years.

And regardless of your beliefs or feelings about Jesus, you have to admit that his teachings on ethics are very powerful.

Jesus is credited with speaking what’s usually referred to as The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s actually a paraphrase quote from Matthew 7:12. A modern translation puts it this way: “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you.”

There is no question that both history and modern society would be very different if everyone lived by that principle; if we-each one of us-treated everyone we met: rich or poor, literate or inarticulate, genius or mentally challenged, healthy or ill, complete or handicapped, regardless of race, creed, denomination, nationality, or political beliefs, with the same courtesy, care, and consideration we would like to receive; if their needs were of higher priority to us than our own.

We live in an imperfect world, comprised of imperfect societies and filled with imperfect people. And to be honest, I see no hope of attaining perfection on this earth. When I read the Bible carefully, I see people just like the people I work with and for; just like the people I live among; and, unfortunately, some people not much different from Adam Lanza. Homo sapiens hasn’t appreciably improved in the last 2000 years, from my point of view. Oh, we have more knowledge; we have more extravagant philosophies; and we certainly have a lot more toys with which to get into trouble. But inside, at the core of us, we haven’t improved. And that means that things like this tragedy will continue to occur.

Does that mean we give up? Does that mean that we just let the evil that exists in the world today take control? Does that mean that we allow acts such as Adam Lanza’s to occur in our world and in our lives without response?

I submit to you that the answer is a loud and resounding “No!”

Here’s another quote:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

No one really knows who first stated that in just those words. It’s been attributed to Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mills, and Charles F. Aked. But really, knowing the authorship doesn’t affect the truth of that sentence. It is, by every standard I can apply, a true statement. And from it we can draw a corollary that if good people want to resist the triumph of evil, they-we-must do something.

I submit to you that this is not a question of programs, or societies, or governments. I submit to you that the only solution that will work is The Golden Rule. Resistance to evil must begin with each one of us and how we relate to each other, whether it’s a co-worker, a neighbor, the barrista at the local Starbucks, the check-out clerk at Wal-Mart . . . you get the drift.

John Wesley, Christian evangelist and the founder of the Methodist denomination, I think expressed what our reaction should be as well as anyone. He put it like this: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”

So in the true spirit of the Christmas season, and in the wake of the tragedy in Connecticut, here’s our challenge:

Do good to everyone you meet. Be kind to everyone you meet. Not just at Christmas season, but every day of every week of every year. To do less is to give in.

Merry Christmas.