Ah, the blogosphere. For years I avoided it. However, like CDs, DVDs, laptops, FaceBook, and all those other 21st Century bits of software and hardware that have, as Andrew Carnegie said, done the business of capitalism by "turning luxuries into necessities", there was no escaping it in the end.
I expect anyone who reads this won't be terribly interested in the random minutiae of my life. The people who want to know those sorts of things already know them. Instead, I want to use this space to talk about my calling: writing and storytelling.
I don't write for a living. Thank goodness, because if I did, I'd be making an hourly wage somewhere in negative digits. Maybe Jackson Browne said it best: "Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive. Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive." I have lots of likes, but only a few loves: my family, pets, reading, and writing.
I've written stories almost as long as I knew how to hold a #2 pencil. When I was 8, I wrote an adventure story called "The Commando Raiders". I was reading about World War II a lot, and the Commandos sounded like a pretty hardcore bunch of guys, so I thought I'd write a great story about them. I illustrated it with Crayola markers, and the teacher got the class's books bound in totally inappropriate floral-print covers. It was a ridiculous story, of course, but on reflection, I've seen less realistic adventure tales in movie theaters since then, so maybe I was on the right track.
In Middle School, 7th Grade, I wrote my first really long piece of work. It was called "Facets of a Crystal Blade". Fantasy has always been a genre that's called to me, ever since my dad read "The Hobbit" to my brother and me when I was 5. "Facets" was about 95% derivative, copycat schlock, but hidden inside it were a couple of good scenes, some character concepts, and the idea of a magical sword with the power to destroy kingdoms. Looking back, I can see the faintest little hints of ideas that would later come out in more serious work.
Other stories followed. There was "A Matter of Honor", about a knight who sacrifices his life to strike down a demon-king with a magic sword. Then, in 9th and 10th Grade, I wrote a sci-fi trilogy ("Acceptable Risks", "Soldiers of Conscience" and "World Without Heroes") which went to some very dark places, and (with the benefit of hindsight) probably should have warned me I was drifting toward serious depression. I graduated high school, headed off for college--and stopped writing fiction.
This was mostly due to workload. I'd gotten used to being able to do my homework pretty quickly, and still having time and inclination for creative writing. But I'd also taken up tabletop miniature gaming, and my creativity got channeled into painting little metal-and-plastic soldiers for several years. But then, as my senior year worked its way towards its close, I took a poetry writing seminar.
Something came loose inside me. It was a lot like having your voice break as a teenager; you find after a while that you can still talk, but the voice isn't the same one you had before. I discovered my grown-up writing voice. It had been hiding in college essays and roleplaying game sessions, slowly developing. I wrote some poems that were trite and derivative, yes, but I also wrote some that were the best writing I'd done.
Life got in the way after college, and the next year was spent moving, finding a job, getting an apartment, and figuring out where things were going with my girlfriend (as it turned out, they went in the direction of marriage). But then I was laid off my retail job after the Christmas shopping season, and suddenly found myself with way too much time on my hands. Trying not to worry too much about my dwindling bank balance (and failing), I started thinking about writing again. But this time, I wanted to write a novel.
I had a basic idea: what if there was a magical thing, a sword maybe, that would give you whatever you most wanted? I also had some characters in mind. They were archetypes to begin with, but I thought I could make them real. A two-hour phone conversation with my best childhood friend got my pistons firing. I decided to write a page a day, 12-point print, single-space.
It didn't work out that way. Three years of writing passed, along with two more moves, a wedding, and all sorts of other real-life concerns. Then came another year of editing, going back over every one of the 263,000-odd words I'd written, chopping, adding, and modifying. And even then I wasn't done.
Everyone tells you to get used to rejection when you're trying to publish a book. But I didn't realize just how soul-destroying it can get, to look up an agent, carefully craft a query letter, send it off--if you're lucky, with a sample of the work itself--and then, a month or two later, to get back a single-page letter saying, in effect, thanks but no thanks. I lost count at about 40 rejections.
Finally, I decided to succumb to the modern era and try my hand at self-publishing. I contacted one of my best friends from college, a professional artist (http://www.halfsparkle.com/), and asked her to make me a cover and a map. While we went back and forth, making sure it came out just right, I worked out Amazon's Kindle epublishing.
And that's the end of that leg of the journey. "Ember of Dreams" went up for download July 9, 2011 (http://www.amazon.com/Ember-Dreams-Clarion-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B005BYX9NA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1312729861&sr=1-1), more than 5 years after I first started it.
I'm not done writing, of course. I won't be tinkering with "Ember" anymore. It's a finished product, and I'm not George Lucas, so I don't feel the need to go back and change things around. But there are plenty of other ideas out there, and I hope to move faster with the next one (more on that later).
Whew! This was originally going to be just a couple of paragraphs of introduction. J.R.R. Tolkien said that "dwarves' tongues run long when speaking of their work." In future posts, I'm planning on talking about the writing process itself, things I look for in writing, and hopefully garner some discussion from visitors. Welcome, anyone who's interested in talking about writing in a civil and courteous way. I look forward to the conversation!
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