the newsroom

I’m infatuated with a TV show. It’s been a while. I mean, of course I watched Game of Thrones. What self-respecting fantasy writer (or aspiring fantasy writer) hasn’t? And it’s great entertainment, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no infatuation. I just like it, a lot. But this new show – it’s infatuation, moving towards love.

I doubt very much that you’ll be surprised when I tell you that the show is Aaron Sorkin’s  The Newsroom. I didn’t watch much of The West Wing – no cable at the time and the Internet was not yet all over streaming things like that – but the couple episodes I saw were enjoyable. From a distance though, it seemed like a bit of a fairytale: centrist, pragmatically progressive president making the decisions we wish the American president had been making, and showing the heart we wish he’d been showing, during the height of the Dubya debacle. In the absence of regular exposure to the show, I just never developed an attachment. I never had a chance to properly suspend disbelief.

truth and intentions

Somewhere between grades eight and nine everything changed. I mean, things had changed a lot already. Dad was gone, a few years gone, and Mom had turned home into a group home, and I was living in the shed, and I was still awkward and happier in my own company than anyone else’s.

i'm older today than i was yesterday

It’s my birthday today. Forty-five years. I’m not sure what that means, or if it means anything specifically, or even if it's supposed to.

I’m not much of a sentimentalist, although birthdays and New Years are about the only national holidays that I don’t consider hypocritical in most ways. They remain what they have always been: reasons to party. And numbers don’t mean much either, do they? I appreciate the experience that the extra time provides, and occasionally wish I’d known then what I know now, but I had to not know it at some point to be able to learn it, right? Chickens, eggs, always getting us into arguments.

renewing acquaintances

Three months. That’s kind of a long time for an unannounced hiatus. Although the writing was on the wall even back in November.

Mic check. Mic check. Anyone still out there?

What can I say? I’ve been busy. Some of the busy-ness has been good, some not so much. Most of it remains, but I cleared a bit of time for you and me.

this is our one demand

It was a busy, irresponsible summer full of visiting and hiking and revisions. But not much in the way of blogging. I’m not apologizing, I’m bragging. Just to be clear. There may or may not be in increase in posting now that the weather may or may not be getting less cooperative. Then again, there’s hockey to play.

Today, however, I came across the following - a creative, subversive, beautiful, and heart-breaking response to media complaints that the Occupy Wall Street movement has not stated specific goals. That they are just protesting, willy-nilly and all, and don’t have enough direction to their dissent. How dare they not have a published set of reasons! How dare they not have made a list!

This is their response, as copied and pasted from wilderside.wordpress.com: 

This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

not a list

I had the unusual urge tonight to write a list of things that I did this week, which is unusual because I don’t generally feel “list” urges. In fact, I have a thing about not writing lists. Like not writing them is a small rebellious victory every time I avoid making one.

I equate lists with “people who get shit done” a lot of the time, even though I know several wonderful people that swear by them, and even though I used to have to make them all the time so that I could “get shit done” back before the life inversion started. But when it did start – the inversion – list-making was one of the things near the top of the “things I’m not going to do anymore because they carry with it an association of losing my soul” list. Which didn’t actually exist because, well, I stopped making lists.

If I had created such a list, however, of those things that I wasn’t going to do to avoid having my soul sucked, list-making would have been up there with tie-wearing and all forms of non-organic, manufactured marketing (of self or anything external).

So, there cannot be, for the reasons mentioned above, a list of things that I did this week. However, if there were such a list, created for posterity because it felt a bit like a minor internal tectonic shift kind of week, it would have included some or all of the following:

I hiked a local (small, not really even a) mountain in the city where I live, and did it in the dark, which allowed me to see the twinkling fake lights of the remarkably boring-looking city below me and the far more brilliant lights of the clear, endless, indigo-dark sky above; I assembled a home gym and a treadmill (for money – a new thing that I hope will allow me to escape the infuriatingly stubborn gravitational pull of working in fucking casinos for a living); there were continued fifth revisions of THE NOVEL (too important not to highlight, but not ironic enough for quotation marks), which go well and are heading in new and exciting directions as I pour through the beta-feedback I’ve received while simultaneously remembering how I wanted to write something with a strong plot and action that still aspired to be faintly literary in scope and theme; I finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was delectable, invigorating, and heartbreaking all at the same time (and which was also the perfect novel to read as I embarked on THE NOVEL revisions, a reminder that great writing can and should sneak up on you at least as often as it hits you over the head; I also blew through The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield (the guy who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, [which I loved way before the movie] – who knew?), a book that will require subsequent readings to fully appreciate because it’s so simple and profound – profound in its simplicity and, not surprising, simple in its profundity; I spent an entire day doing maintenance on my POS Jeep (oil and filter changes, chassis lubing, and chasing down miscellaneous squeaks and rattles) during which I found a sizable rock partially lodged between my transfer case skid plate and the case itself, the removal of which resulted in a rattle-free Jeep – a minor miracle; I went climbing and did some trail jogging and some yoga as part of my effort to get back into decent enough shape so as not to die of a heart attack come the advent of hockey (playing) season in September; I dealt around 300-400 hands of poker, a fact that I find both continually amazing and slightly depressing.

If I’d have written that list (which I would, heaven forefend, nevereverever do on account of the aforementioned aversion to list making), it would have been an incomplete list – obviously – but still a list of marginally-yet-personally interesting things that coalesced into a pretty damned good week.

All I can say is, it’s a good thing that I didn’t (would never) write it, or it might have resulted in a self-indulgent, frivolous post that was more about having fun with complex-compound sentences and semi-colons than saying anything remotely worth saying.*

p.s. I’m going to start Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries next week. So. Stoked.

* Unless you really read between the lines AND read stuff into it that probably isn’t really there.

random check-in

Wow, it’s been a while.

I’ve been a bit confounded by Mom lately, just making sure everything is up to date, chasing clarity and clarification. Truth is she’s doing okay right now. She’s settled since the last couple symptomatic episodes and we’re basking in the eye of the storm for the moment.

Also I was, I think, desperately missing the manuscript. I spent some down time, while I was waiting for beta advice to come in, working on a synopsis (I may actually hate them, synopses, for all the magic they take out of a story), starting the second volume of the saga, but they felt like cheating, like I was being unfaithful. Or maybe it just felt like hubris, as if I was presuming too much. Finishing the first one, making it as shiny (or gritty, as the case may be) as I can has become (appropriately?) a holy grail of sorts.

Anyway, I got the beta critiques back last weekend and started on revisions, possibly the final round before I actually consider it ready for agents to look at, and the clouds broke as I began. You’d think I’d learn.

…

About Mom, one of the things that got me down was the thought that diagnosis of degenerative dementia, probably like any degenerative disease diagnosis, is essentially a call to start grieving now. It’s a time bomb with no counter – it’s just going to go off, a bit at a time, until the final big boom. And there’s not much you can do about it. We can only work hard to try to stay in the moment. And sometimes, often even, that works, mostly when we’re together and laughing and talking. But there are the quiet times and, in the silence, sometimes, the idea of a clock ticking down feels a bit overwhelming.

It’s all the journey though, right? Good goes with bad, darkness with light, the bitter makes the sweet taste better.

…

I was thinking about how it’s our cultural nature to make things as difficult as possible. We create our society based on the square, fighting nature. We make things straight and hard, all roads and stairs and sidewalks, doors and walls and ceilings. Even when we absolutely have to bend to accommodate nature, the goal is still to minimize the incline, reduce the curves as much as possible, tame the topography.

And then I thought about hiking, being out past the manicured paths. Out there you follow the line that makes the most sense, often following in the footsteps of animals. The lines aren’t straight, nothing is manufactured – it’s organic, and logical in a way that only the wild can be. Intuitive.

And hey, when you find a pause on the path, whatever the reason, the view tends to be fucking awesome. Double rainbow awesome.

P.S. Don’t you love how rioters in the UK are either all stupid, selfish looters and hooligans, OR all politically marginalized and disenfranchised citizens expressing legitimate rage? Why don’t they use AND in that equation? How can they not use it? How stupid does one have to be to not see that there’s legitimate rage AND selfish violence in the dynamic? And why is the UK so goddamed different than Egypt or Tunisia where the frustration was lauded?

P.P.S. I’m reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad this week. And loving it. It’s as brilliant as a Pullitzer winner should be. I read Neil Gaman’s American Gods last week (AG was on recommendation from Judy Clement Wall – how did I miss that one?) and loved it too. It’s been a helluva good book month so far.

chrysalis... or gas

Ever notice how sometimes life seems to throw up these undeniable lines of demarcation? These chasms that are invisible as you approach, and then, one day, you look back and notice that you've crossed a great divide, one that can't be re-crossed – there's no going back – and that you couldn't have seen to avoid even if you'd wanted to? And they're only obvious in hindsight?

Well, I think I'm in the middle of one. And from here, being even digitally social feels really hard.

Not that there isn't a lot to talk about going on out there. Part of me is still in shock in the wake of the Canadian federal election. I feel like I don't know where I live anymore. My country feels bi-polar in the bad ways. And then people rioted in Vancouver, people that called themselves fans of a game played by adults but were really just idiots, or alcohol-induced idiots at very least, and watching that play out in the media has been worth talking about too. And there's Syria, and a new Gaza flotilla, and a new illegal war in Libya complete with assassination attempts that fly in the face of international law. Even if I was just taking a break from politics, I'm still loosing sleep thinking about the oil and vinegar symbiosis of art and capitalism; how the oil involved doesn't feel very edible to me, and how I think vinegar is a crappy metaphor for art. Seriously... losing sleep. So it's not like there isn't plenty to talk about...

I just don't have the will to talk. I feel like my hands are pretty full right here at home.

I went through one of these chrysalis periods a couple years ago when the life-inversion started. I guess, to be honest, I sort of felt that one coming too, but I wasn't aware of feeling it until I was past it and had one of those, “Oh, that's what that was” moments. In a sense, maybe, this is still the same process of change that I'm in the middle of. Or maybe, like glissading down a mountain side, there are times when you start something, it gathers its own momentum and takes on a life of its own, and we just have to ride the slope until we stop and hope an avalanche isn't on our heels.

I won't know, of course, until I'm through it, so I could be wrong. I might actually be in that weird space, mid-leap, with gravity pulling at me, fighting the momentum that should carry me over the gap, my arms and legs swinging as if I wish I had something to hold onto. I might have actually noticed this time, in situ as it were, instead of only realizing from the perspective of twenty-twenty hindsight.

Or I might just have eaten something weird and it has me all discombobulated.

I honestly don't know, but everything feels weird, as if I'm in a movie and the DVD is skipping on a frame with a CG scene-to-scene bleed effect. The cat keeps walking by, if you know what I mean...

And even if I'm right, I'm not exactly sure what the feeling signifies; what the chasm is; what the change will be or mean. Which makes being aware of it kind of frustrating. It's a hurry up and wait scenario. I feel like the dog named Stay.

I wonder if, in that last moment before they wake up to their new life, zombies feel like this.

Or maybe they think that it was just some bad brains they ate...

So, yeah, I'm holding my figurative breath. Call it an involuntary hiatus. Or maybe the calm before the storm. Or indigestion. I'm still around though. Miss you guys and all that.

P.S. The manuscript is still with my beta readers. Early returns are good and remarkably helpful. One day I'll have to take a long trip and buy a bunch of dinners.

mile marker

I finished The Novel today. Well, not finished, but I passed a marker and have a beta draft almost ready to mail/print for the brave few that have agreed to read it and offer an opinion so that I can do the really real final draft before I start looking for an agent who can then tell me to change it some more so they can find a publisher who will undoubtedly have just a few more suggestions.

It's depressing when I think of it that way, so I'm just going to bask in the moment and enjoy the feeling of finishing. Not the penultimate draft, maybe, but a penultimate draft. The first of several.

I hope the second one is a bit easier than this one... And I will now proceed to do the happy dance.

apathy and an update

First, Canada is having an election and I have strong feelings about it.

My vote is already cast (I'll be away from my riding on election day and in Mexico for the advanced polls, so I mailed the damned thing in), but I know it won't make much of a difference. That's partly because I don't live in anything approaching a swing riding - the vast majority of my civic neighbors buy into the "me first" concept. The Okanagan Valley is a pretentious area full of rich retirees.

It's also partly because of our electoral system here in Canada, which is similar to the one used in the US, uses a "first past the post" benchmark to decide winners. It's more obvious in Canada where the multi-party system allows a party with only 35% of the national vote to form the government, but that system is whack. I long for reform that would include some of the representational and preferential innovations used in Europe. Canadians are told that we're apathetic, but I think this brilliant (and short) TED talk manages to nail the problem. I don't think that institutionalized systems to promote apathy are endemic to only Canada either.


The good news is that, if those controls are enforced strongly and long enough, things like what's happening in North Africa happen, and masses revolt against tyranny. The sad part is that it has to get pretty bad for a long time to get people desperate enough to act like that.

Anyway, with Canada going to the polls and the US already ramping up for 2012, please watch. Please vote. There's more we have to do than just vote. but that's the very least we can and should do. Until real change comes, we can at least be active mitigating the damage.

And and update on the WIP. I have about ten chapters left to revise and my pace is good. I think I'll be done on Tuesday, which will leave time for mailing and printing copies on Wednesday for my beta readers. The manuscript is changing, evolving, but not getting shorter, so I think I'll still be looking at a 175k-word behemoth to try to query. I dunno, maybe the beta readers will find some serious fat that I don't have eyes to see.

Or not. I think I'm truly past worrying about trying to fit into categories of marketability or conform to the guidelines. I think it's good. I think it's almost the story I wanted to write, close enough to make me smile at unexpected moments and have to take occasional breaks to catch my breath. But I'm biased, aren't I?

It's like in politics: If we have an opinion, chances are, we're biased. That's a hard thing to avoid. Maybe it just can't, and shouldn't, be tried. In a civil society, a real democracy, disparate views could be shared, discussed, argued even, and still there would be respect. The absence of respect in modern politics is as glaringly obvious as the presence of it is when I think about the readers and artists that are helping me make the WIP a reality.

Anyway, my iced matcha latte with almond milk is ready now. Back to it. Hope you're well...

pause for gratitude

Revisions are going well, thanks for asking. There aren't enough hours in the day, or days left before April 21, but that's my own fault. Sleep is over-rated anyway. That said, the #amrevising is going very well. I may have to sleep on the plane and the first two days in Mexico, but I can live with that.

TED.com sent this today and I watched, happily. It's slightly inspiring in the way TED.com videos can be. I thought of life-inversions and starting over and how happy I am that I found myself in a place to make the choices I made a couple years ago. I thought about how everything in our society is being driven in a direction that makes everything a struggle, and things like life inversions as difficult as possible. I thought about elections and hoping that we change directions, even if the change we might make is to a direction that's not as bad that the current one, instead of actually to the right direction. I thought about how fortunate I am to be doing what I love most of the time instead of just when I can squeak it in. I thought about the people I love who inspire me every day.

So here I am, stopping in to say 'hi', full of gratitude. And sleep deprived, but loving it. Enjoy the video...

obsession

I feel like I’m carrying an elephant.

There’s three weeks – well a bit less – until my promised shipping date for the beta version of the manuscript. As usual, this is affecting my posting prolificacy.

At times like this I have to court obsession, give into it, let it own me. It means ignoring as many other things in my life as possible, and that’s not completely healthy, but that’s apparently how I work.

I wonder how much of being creative requires a willingness to be unhealthy? I mean, I know it doesn’t, at least on paper. When I get like this, I feel like a cliché. I hate feeling like a cliché.

So this is an apology of sorts, after the fact in some ways, in advance in others. Part of me feels bad for not nursing the blog the way I should. I feel worse when I realize that I’m temporarily turning my back on something that I love, the blog, while still slaving at the casino, a place I hate. I have to ignore the dissonance of that dynamic or risk being distracted from the obsession.

I’ll see you when there’s a victory to report, or something distracts me enough to overpower the obsession.

Otherwise, I’ll see you on the other side. Be well…

in the absence of answers

What a great day yesterday was.

Like I said yesterday, it was tear down day at the climbing gym, the day we closed early so as to strip every hold off of every wall so that the route setting geniuses can start putting up comp routes for the weekend. So we twisted bolts and climbed ladders and pealed tape from 8 to 10, 14 of us or so, in a hectic, frenetic, kinetic laugh-a-thon.

Before that, I got to do some #amrevising, working on a chapter that required more than just fixing little things, doing a line by line edit in order to take an emaciated framework and add some flesh to it. The more I revise, the more I understand how writers can have a problem letting go of a WIP, especially a first one: There’s so much learning, evolving, improving involved in the first time that, every time I come back to a chapter I haven’t touched for a month or two, I see entirely different ways to make it better.

At this rate, the manuscript will be finished never. That’s not a tenable position, so I’ve set April 21 as my mail-to-beta-readers day. I can get all picky again after that, but I have to actually set a shipping date, because the learning will never end.

 I also got to carry on my favorite ongoing internet conversation before the gym, and I got in a great (if short) session of climbing before the strip-fest began.

And then, as if all of that wasn’t enough, I was provided the bonus of listening to a repeat of this morning's Q with Jion Ghomeshi on the drive home. The part I listened to was an interview with Canadian musical icon Bruce Cockburn. I’ve never actually been a huge fan, but have always respected him. His music has never moved me miles, but his activism and integrity have.

He was talking about his visit to Afghanistan in 2009. His brother is a Captain and physician in the Canadian Armed Forces (family dinners might be interesting), and he also played a concert for the Canadian troops there. He said that the people he talked to there, members of the medical mission, believed in their role but thought it would take 30 years for it too succeed; that a place like Afghanistan would need that much time just to birth and raise a generation that had a concept of what peace might look like.

They didn’t expect that the mission there would last that long.

I thought of Greg Mortensen (Three Cups of Tea) and his effort to accomplish the same goal – a generation of Afghanis and Pakistanis that understand the concept of peace – through education. I had a hard time not contrasting the two approaches.

Cockburn talked about his other trips to war zones, both as an activist and performer. He said that he’s never gone to a war zone looking for material for his art. There are people, he said, that have a mandate to do so - journalists, writers, photographers, maybe poets – but that for him, doing so would have felt ‘inappropriate’.

But, he said, he always went with his eyes open. He went open to everything, but not looking for anything in specific. If material presented itself, he was prepared to accept it. And if it came, then it was his responsibility to apply all of his skill and craft to make the most of it.

I thought about the concept of manufactured versus organic, of counterfeit versus authentic. I thought it was a great way to view creativity – being open to the truth, and then applying every possibility of craft to take advantage of that truth. I thought about Elizabeth Taylor and how she might be as remembered for her activism (on behalf of HIV/AIDS going back way before it was fashionable) as she will be for the soap opera of her celebrity. I thought about which one I’d want to be remembered for.

It’s easy, I think, in our plastic world of intentional media confusion, our age of persuasion, to forget that people inhabit the caricatures we watch rise and fall on TV; that real people with sincere motives fight in wars that we detest. Lately, for me, it has seemed crucially important to remember how complicated everything is.

There were no conclusions to reach, none that did service to the issues. The perspective of complexity answers no questions at all, makes finite truths seem very far away, but while I sat here and nursed my sore wrists and stiff hands, the questions seemed more important than the answers anyway.

dreams of fantasies, fantasies of dreaming

I had a dream the other night. I was in a sword fight and, frankly holding my own, dammit. Everything was in slow motion, and color, and I remember thinking, “I’m dreaming!” and being excited about it because I just don’t seem to ever remember my dreams, and I certainly never seem cognizant of dreaming while doing it.

Or maybe I do, but I just don’t remember about it afterwards.

Anyway, I woke up in the morning and realized that I both remembered the dream and had, at some point, grabbed a katana I have in a stand on my headboard (it’s not THAT weird, really – I’ve studied kenjutsu, so I had a reason to buy it in the first place) and it was lying on the bed spread next to me.

So I guess we’re kind of officially seeing each other now. I wonder if I have to change my FB relationship status? Does “It’s complicated” really cover it?

I put this all in context though: I’m deep into semi-final revisions on Hand of God, my fantasy manuscript, in the last weeks before I send it off to my beta readers. Yes, beta readers. I have some. They’re cool people that I have either known for years or will one day meet outside of Twitter and Facebook and e-mail.

I’m a bit afraid of them too though. I mean, I’ve obviously chosen people I trust deeply, and whose opinion I clearly value, but what if the manuscript doesn’t live up to my self-believing hype? That would be embarrassing as hell. What if they don’t get the Dr. Seuss rhyming scheme or the stick-figure illustrations? What if the themes of alienation and self-realization aren’t clear in between the epic fight scenes and the pages-long descriptions of imaginary landscapes. What if the made up names for places and things based on Jellie Bellie flavors just don’t fly?

My head’s spinning with the permutations of rejection. And I haven’t even finished my query letter yet. I realistically recognize that it may take up to three agent queries to find “the one” for me. How will I handle the rejection from the first two?

Taken in this light, sleeping with a sword suddenly seems infinitely reasonable.

I’m going back to bed. Come’ere, lover.

chasing dragons

When I was fourteen or so, back in the days of Mom’s heroics, I fell into a fairly profound depression that lasted for about six years. As amazing as her actions to keep us roofed and clothed and fed were, as super-human as her efforts to care for our schizophrenic borders were, the effort took its toll too. There were large rents in the fabric of our lives, and I slipped through a few of them.

Mom never knew how bad it was at the time. We’ve talked about it since, cried and accepted and forgiven each other for the missteps and gaps. That’s all there was to do.

There’s no such thing as a normal life anyway. TV is just theatre. I’ve never met anyone that had a “normal” childhood.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thankful for what we had. It could have been worse. I was cared for and provided for, and I learned autonomy early. I was perhaps neglected in some ways, trusted by default to find my way, but never abused. I always knew I was loved.

But I had a serious mind, and it led me to dark places, and Mom had her own demons to struggle with. I survived it. Barely, I realized later, looking back. There were close calls. But I survived. We both did.

After the accident, when my marriage was falling apart, there was another depression. This time I was able to get help and it was shorter, but the return to depression had been unsettling. Profoundly unsettling. Walking over your own grave unsettling.

Looking back on the last couple months, and especially weeks, I realize now that I was starting to feel a fear, in the back of my head where I couldn’t quite reach it, that I was sliding down the rabbit hole again. That I was falling into pits too deep for me to extricate myself from. That I was slipping away and that all the work I thought I’d done had obviously not been as complete as I’d thought. (And, of course, it isn’t complete, never is, but that’s okay and a different thing all together anyway.) With words all dried up, even the desire to write absent, I was getting very worried that something was seriously wrong.

I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself or anyone else. My friends were worried, I could tell. But I just curled in. It’s what I usually do; try to fix it myself for as long as I can. It generally works, even if it’s not a perfect system. Knowing that support is ready and waiting is usually enough. I still have all those ingrained habits of (perhaps unhealthy) autonomy though. It’s what I do.

But it wasn’t a slip into depression this last few weeks. It was just the mother of all colds, or maybe an inconvenient string of them. I woke up Wednesday and felt human for the first time in a while, then felt better yesterday, and today I’m feeling practically normal.

And I’m breathing heavy sighs of relief.

From here, coming out the other side, I can see that my malaise wasn’t a descent into darkness. The fear was unfounded. But it was there. That’s worth taking note of. I’m taking notes. There’s (always) still work to do.

But there’s good news in this too. When I was telling myself and everyone else that it was just a cold, I was right. While I may have a fear of some of the dark places I’ve lived in, I’m not the person that fell into those pits anymore. Who I was doesn’t define who I am.

And I think I feel pretty damned good about that.

...

P.S. I finished the full reading and notes for the manuscript draft today. The last revisions before beta reading start on Monday.

i have a confession

I’ve been more aware than usual lately that I tend to work my way around things obliquely before I actually tackle them head on. I allude to a lot of things for a long time until I screw up the courage, or find the right time, or my self-imposed defensive orbit just degrades to the point that I fall into the gravity well. Directly talking about writing -  that I write and that I want to be a writer, like for a living - is one of them.

It’s time I come clean.

I’ve talked about a bunch of other things that the life-inversion is about; how much I had grown to hate profit motives, consumerism, the systems of the world and politics, my addictions to stuff and appearances, and all the things that we use to anesthetize ourselves – that I used to anesthetize myself with for so long - and how I needed to make drastic changes in order to chase after a better me. All of those things are very true and close to my heart. But it was the story, the novel, that was the real reason. It was the thought of telling stories like my favorite authors told - stories that snuck past my defenses and made me think and aspire – that kept me up at night. It was the thought of the process of telling those stories and how it might help me grow and expand that made me smile at unexpected moments, like a jolt of pure joy. It was always about the stories.

The story, the one I’m trying to tell right now, is a giant, massive beast of an epic fantasy. The manuscript, as I work deep into the second draft, sits just a bit over 200,000 words, and it’s the first of the at least four volumes I believe it will take to tell the whole tale. This alone might make it a cumbersome thing to try to get published, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve written it this way, on this scale, to make it harder for myself. I do that sometimes, like exaggerating the dream of being a writer: I make it so big that I don’t have to worry about it ever being more than a dream because it’s so unrealistic.

But it is realistic. The story is alive to me. I think I’d read it and fall in love with the landscapes and cultures, the heroes and anti-heroes and complicated antagonists, their foibles and demons and dreams, and the messed up realities that they have to face and overcome to try to make things fit. I want it to work as a great story, one that people can escape into as a pure adventure. I want people to read and be there, and feel what the characters feel, and wish it would never end.

I also have hubristic aspirations. I want the story, the way I tell it, to work on more levels than just as a story. I desire it to be like my favorites, with nuances and insights and things below the surface worth digging for, things that come up for air between the plot lines and dialog, or that reveal themselves only through a process of erosion. I want it to measure up to the tales I loved - the genre and non-genre ones - that broke me open and made my world a bigger place and challenged me in tragic and beautiful ways to see the world exactly the way it is and still be a dreamer. To know the truth and still dream.

But I’m still afraid of that dream in fundamental ways too. It’s so precious to me, has been for so long, that the thought of trying and failing paralyzes me sometimes. I have a fear of failure and have had it for a long, long time. I fear that it will simply be not good enough to publish. Or worse, that I will not be sufficient to the aspiration; that I’ll betray my characters and fail to tell their stories properly. That I’ll let them and the story down. It’s the breathstopping fear of letting the story down that paralyzes me the most.

That’s a danger with dreams; sometimes they take on such mythic proportions that we’re afraid to approach them, afraid that we won’t be up to that challenge, and afraid that failing will mean we were never meant to own the dream in the first place. That’s my biggest fear by far.

Although I rarely remember my dreams, I do have this one recurring nightmare:

In the dream I’m sitting at the laptop and suddenly realize that I’m out of stories to tell. The well is dry and I have nothing left worth trying to say. The realization stuns me and I stop typing. And then the walls start to slowly, quietly crack and disintegrate as if they were made of sand the whole time and all it took was a puff of hesitation to bring the house down. I look down at my hands, at my palms, trying to figure out what went wrong, and the same thing starts to happen to my fingers, each digit first blurring and then softly blowing away from the tip down to the palm down to the wrist. And that’s about when I always wake up.

And then, in the dark, I realize that the truth is scarier: I haven’t even finished the first story, and I have nobody to lay that culpability on but myself.

I hate fear, and love it. I hate it when I let it slow me, and love it when I overcome it. I know that I cannot overcome it if it isn’t there, so I try to embrace it and be thankful for the opportunity it represents, but that’s hard too. One of my favorite storytellers, Frank Herbert, had some wonderful things to write about fear, and I remember them almost daily. And I remember that courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

I have come to love this blog, but right now it’s also providing a lot of distraction; fun temptations full of writing bite-sized, pretty, thoughtful, ugly, silly things and receiving immediate feedback. I love where TOL has taken me, is taking me – the friends it’s introduced me to and the ways it’s made me stretch. But it’s in the way right now.

So I’m going to take a partial hiatus from thinkingoutloud-land. I think this means one post a week until V 2.0 of the manuscript is done, but I’m not making any promises.

I need to get obsessive and just finish it. As Sugar would say, I need to finally rip this second beating heart out of me. Because I write, I’m a writer, and there are stories to tell.

And I need to do it before my hands blow away.

It feels good to get that off my chest. Thanks for bearing witness.

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To everyone that comes here and reads, whether you comment or not (but there’s a special place in my heart for those that join the discussion), both here and on FB, thank you. Just having you around, sharing your thoughts, means the world. Give me through the end of the year or so and we’ll see about getting back to our regularly scheduled programming.