writing skills/profession

The State of the Writing


I have been working on Night Dogs as my primary fiction piece. It’s coming along slowly now. This seems to be the way of storytelling. An idea appears, details gel and I write like gangbusters and then it slows as the story starts to demand sturdier legs to stand on. However, this is probably the best story of this length I have ever written and I know it has novel potential. My goal is to finish it in May and workshop it via a writing course I am going to be taking at the university this June.

Which leaves my regular readers wondering about the memoir? Well, maybe you aren’t. I haven’t forgotten it. Ideas about what to do with the rough draft swirl, recede before morphing into something tangible.

It’s hard to pick up again because it was hard to write. Deliberately picking at emotional scars is not my idea of something that is good for a person, but I want to finish it. It’s just not going to be quite the memoir it started out to be.

I have come to realize that the story of my loss and widowhood is not a story that would strike a cord with too many people. And, that the loss was not mine. It was Will’s loss. He died. Too young and too horrifically. All I lost was the option to live a life I thought I was supposed to live, however, that life was never mine to live. It was not a part of the great overall scheme of things for me. My loss was insignificant compared to his.

No, the story is in accepting and rebuilding because how many people really and truly do that?

And it’s Rob’s story too, so I have been in semi-discussions with him about writing his story as it overlaps with mine. He is warming to the idea, but regardless, we wouldn’t start on it until summer. So that is where that is.

I continue fitfully at 50 Something Moms. I have two short works I want to finish this spring that have promise, and then there are the boxes in the basement with half-finished or simply outlines ideas that I need to go through.

And thus I end my state of the writing address, dear readers.

The Right Stuff


According to writer Nancy Kress, there are about six traits a person must possess in order to be a writer. So I thought it would be fun, or maybe just informative, to measure myself against them as I am in serious career direction consideration mode.

  • the ability to tolerate long periods of time alone (or surrounded by people who don’t actually exist)

I could fill rooms with the people I know who don’t actually exist outside the space between my ears. And being alone is an art form I perfected as a child.

  • the arrogance to believe that, however crappy your current work and however much rejected, you will get good enough for other people to want to read what you write

Well, apparently I am quite arrogant because not only do I believe I will be published someday, I believe that readers will buy the books I write.

  • the humility to understand the limits of your talent, and to learn from what editors, reviewers, and writing-group colleagues tell you about your work

Oh, I know a better writer than myself when I read one. And believe it or not, I take criticism to heart.

  • a love of reading and of stories (I have never met a writer who didn’t read fiction voraciously, at least while young, and who didn’t tell himself stories in which he was the hero)

I am not a voracious reader of fiction these days. I simply don’t have the time and I don’t run across authors who can really transport me or inspire me either. Is that a function of old age? Or am I just too much in writer mode to not pick at the work of others? I don’t know. I read books a week as a child and well beyond college. I was even still a better than average reader in the early days of my first marriage. Now it has to be a really great book to hold me still long enough to read.

Oh, and I am always a central figure in my own fiction though my hero tends to be Rob-like.

  • self-motivation, since one must work without a boss, an external work structure, or, often, a deadline

Blogging has helped me develop a work ethic. Group blogging is good for imposing outside structures and deadlines. Fiction efforts though are still scattered. A dilemma that may lead me away from the web soon, but I am still working things out.

  • for the SF writer, the peculiar cast of mind that finds a future world, an alien planet, or a magical realm fully as solid and believable as the chair he’s sitting on — at least for the length of the writing session

I have never had difficulty suspending my belief.

My Influences


I wasn’t allowed to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind when it was first out. I was going on 14 and had cleverly bypassed my Dad’s edict against sci-fi and fantasy movies for me with Star Wars the summer before by getting my cousin to take me while we were visiting. I had no such foil for Spielberg’s first alien movie. The first time I saw the whole thing, however, I was struck by the feeling I had seen it before. Chris Carter is so lucky that Spielberg didn’t sue his arse.

The reason I was forbidden to go to movies like this was because my parents felt I had an unhealthy interest in all things they considered to be weird and likely to make it hard for me to ever meet someone who might consider marrying me (they didn’t have to add -” because you are already unattractive so try not to be odd too” but it was there).

I loved Dr. Who.

Believed in ESP and ET’s. Read everything I could about both subjects.

Watched every lame sci-fi television show that made it to the airwaves back in the 70’s like Planet of the Apes, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Six Million Dollar Man, Logan’s Run, The Tomorrow People, Kochak: The Night Stalker, Night Gallery.

Remember V? Awesome. Simply awesome idea though the movies themselves are beyond awful when viewed retrospectively.

Or Aeon Flux?

I devoured Frank Herbert and Tolkien.  Anne McCaffery’s Pern books line my shelves along with Stephen King and David Eddings.

I don’t know why the real world doesn’t interest me more. Perhaps it is too real? Or more likely I am a person who prefers being outside of the bounds that most people are most comfortable focusing on.