Feedback, Moving Forward, and Faith

I've been writing in this blog for close to three months now and there have been a few changes since then. For those who haven't noticed, my overall theme has changed a little. The reason is this. Somewhere around my junior year of high school I decided that my passion for reading was something that I might be able to turn into an ability to write. I didn't know where to start, so I just started to write down stories, poems, stray thoughts, anything that interested me. It soon became a habit and after all these years I tend to daydream more often than not, living in worlds in my mind created out of bits and pieces of things I pick up all around me. Well back then I didn't think I was good enough, nor did I ever think I would be. I threw away most of the things I wrote. I couldn't stand to read them, my perceived lack of ability always seemed obvious on every page I wrote. Honestly those things probably were bad but I remember bits and pieces that were, at the very least, good ideas. I should never have thrown them away but at the time I felt that if i couldn't read them then I couldn't let anyone else read them and so there was no point in holding on to them. So I trashed things.

Since then, year after year, I have constantly battled myself. I couldn't stop thinking about it so I wrote. I thought what I wrote was bad so I stopped. Then I started again. Still bad. Finally, after deciding that I could spend the rest of my life thinking I was terrible at the one thing that I have always had a desire to do, I decided to stop constantly beating myself down. After all, if there is only one thing you love to do, that you are passionate about, it shouldn't really matter how good you are. If you're not good enough, keep trying. If you don't see improvment, try it in a different way. Something that sits this deep inside you cannot simply be cast aside. So I'm done with quitting. I'm done with deciding I'm a bad writer. I can't handle giving it up so I'm done with telling myself I'll never succeed. The only way I'll turn this thing I do into something I can completely devote myself to is to keep doing it. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. But I didn't get here alone.

Along the way there were many many people who told me to stop beating myself up. Every once in awhile I would fight myself hard enough to let a friend or family member read what I had written and I got some good feedback. They said they thought I was good. They thought I had talent. I had teachers that told me some of my work showed promise. Back then I brushed it off as biased. They were friends and family. They were being supportive. Only in my twisted little mental battle could I turn support into something that couldn't be true. I gave that up long ago too. My opinion is not the only one that matters and honestly, based on my self deprecating nature, should probably not be at the top of the list. At least not in this matter. Another realization that drove me to this point was constantly talking to, and hearing about, people that were doing things that they love. They love their careers. I've never had a job that I felt that way about. I couldn't imagine turning any of my jobs into a career and then at some point deciding I loved it. I was jealous. I started searching everywhere, anywhere, for the career that I loved. I never found it. Until, that is, I realized that I had found it long ago but never given myself enough credit to think that it could be a career. I thought of it as a hobby. Not even that, really. I think I always treated it like an addiction, something I couldn't stop but had to feed every now and then to keep it from driving me crazy. I denied it and I think, in the process, I was denying myself. I was actively making myself unhappy. It's a stupid thing to do, but I doubt if i'm the only one that's ever done it.

I spent years building all these walls around the thing I loved. No one was allowed to see. It was mine but I was convinced I didn't want it. I couldn't get rid of it so I hid it. Every time it found a crack to seep through I'd put up another wall. I knew all the statistics. The odds of getting published are small. The odds of making a living on it even smaller. I know there are thousands of writers spending years in seeming futility. They keep plugging on. For the longest time I wasn't even willing to try. At the very least this was an insult to them. I'm not really sure how, but I think it was. Maybe in some way I was saying that for me to attempt would be futile because I would never get published. Based on that decision I was basically saying that all those people struggling to achieve the thing that I had already given up were wasting their time. That's not nice. It's not true either. After all of that, all those years, there was one thing that really tipped the scales for me. It made me decide that it was all or nothing. One of the two people that I respect most in this world asked me to make a promise. I have broken promises before, but this is one that I intend to keep. I promised that no matter what I wrote, I would not beat myself up or talk badly about it or say anything about it being worthless in the process.

It seems like a small thing. Maybe when I made the promise I thought it was. As it turns out that one little promised knocked the keystone out of all the defenses that I'd piled up over the years. Of all the things I did over that period of time, I couldn't make myself stop writing. I have to do it. The main defense, the one that was holding everything else up, was deciding in advance that what I was doing was terrible. It probably made a lot of the things I wrote not fun to read all by itself. Now I don't allow myself to do that. If I don't have my little shield to hide behind then I have only two choices. Do it often and give it everything I have, or give it up completely. I tried to do the latter for a long time and I still don't know how. I'm not trying to do that anymore. I think I would lose a part of myself if I did figure it out. So now I must do the former. Suprisingly, it has seemed to let out the beast. I am no longer feeding an addiction to make it go away for awhile. I am embracing a passion that honestly just makes me happy in the doing of it. I care how it turns out, but that's not what this is about. Writing, for me, is about doing the one thing that feels, for the lack of a better word, honest. It is not what I do, it is who I am. That promise carried a lot of weight.

The point of all of this is to say that in the beginning this blog was a sort of game, it fed the addiction, it was entertaining, but it was not the best use for it. I like to talk about reality, but I need this forum to be about something else. This is why most of my recent entries have been abstract, and why they will continue in this vein. I am considering starting a new blog so that I can talk about things other than writing, but I think that this one will be devoted to the fiction in my head. The support of everyone who reads this blog has been very helpful in finally forcing myself to admit, to myself, that this is what I'm going to do. I have always been my own worst enemy but I'm finally trying to fight that tendency. So thanks to all of you for the feedback. It has meant more than you know whether it came on or off the blog. Maybe a few years from now I'll be thanking you in the beginning of a book. I'll let you know if you need to start looking for it on shelves.

So it all comes down to faith. No matter what you do, you have to believe that you can do it. Deciding you will fail before you start will cause you to fail before you start. It's cliche, but it's true. I've been doing it for almost ten years. If you know what you love to do then don't give up on it for something else whether you've got a talent for something else or not. If you have a talent for something but find no joy in it then don't pursue the talent just because you can. Instead, try to apply that talent in some way towards doing the thing you really love to do. Lifes to short to ignore what makes you happy. Within reason. Have faith in yourself. Only you can force yourself to really go after what you're looking for. No one will do it for you. These things are all easy to say, but you have to believe them too. I am finally to the point at which I do believe these things. I know what my career will be. I just have to develope myself well enough to make a living at it at the same time. There is no giving up. Have faith.

Brooksville

A boy, who should have been in school, walks through a mist thick enough to hide the houses he knows he is walking past. He looks down at his feet and can barely see them. It is the knowing they are there, the knowing there is more than that which he can see, that makes him believe in things that most people can't believe. He knows that school is behind him, but also that behind him is where it should stay. He knows there must be other places out there that may suit him better. He knows many things, but these things are not what interest him the most. He is driven by the fact that there are far more things in the world that he doesn't know. Even this, however, is not precisely what drives him. What this boy searches for every minute of wakefulness, and even while he sleeps, are those things that not a single living person has yet discovered. This boy yearns to be the first. So he walks, one step after another, away from that which he knows and into that which he does not.

As each step carries him further along his path he wonders at things that not many people wonder. He thinks that maybe there is a place where the clouds part after a rain and it is not a blue sky that hides behind them. Maybe that sky would be a different color, or maybe there would be no sky at all but simply another world so close that, if you jumped high enough, you could grab on to one of it's trees and climb down it to a place that no one has ever been to before. Or what if there are secret passageways in this real world that he walks in to the worlds of which he is constantly dreaming? Maybe his dreams are a set of windows looking out at places to which all he has to do is find the doors. These doors could be all around him. They could be at the bottom of a hill just behind an old bush. They might be at the back of a cave yet hidden for hundreds of years by a pile of rocks. He wonders if these doors could be even more magical than that. They might be found simply by walking through a forest and stepping through the right pair of trees, but only if you step through the right direction. There could be fairies guarding these gates that will only let you through if you bring the right gift, or dance the right jig. The possibilities seem endless. Ideas like this, which have been called "rediculous" by many and "a fanciful waste of time" by the teacher who's class the boy just walked out of, are what keep him excited and sharp with the anticipation of the next possibility.

He has grown fed up with all the naysayers. He is tired of being told that everything he loves is fake, made-up, or unproductive. This may be true for them, but for the boy it is a reality that's just a little harder to see. He does not wish to have an ordinary job like electrician, or banker or salesman. He dreams being a blacksmith for knights, sailing on a galley to far away lands, and riding a horse down an old dirt road in a land where there is no such thing as a faster way. He wishes to learn how to fight with a sword and to shoot a bow. He will find a magician who lives deep in the woods and learn his trade. These are the stuff of his dreams. He believes them to be real. He believes he can find them. He knows that his soul is the type that will not quit its search until these things he has found. This world is no place for him. This is a boy who will search out a new world.

It has been hours since he started walking. He walked out of town long ago and immediately left the road. He is tired of things that he recognizes. It is still just as foggy as it was when he started walking. When he first left the road he was walking through a farmer's fields plowed in preparation for the planting season. After that it was a great plain of wild grass and mesquite. These things he also knew. After that he walked into a forest which seemed young. The biggest trees had trunks less than a foot in diameter and there were many seedlings fighting to reach the sun. The forest floor was covered with smaller plants. It was at this point that the fog began to lift. He could see that just a mile or so ahead the forest began to change. It was a place he did not recognize and that he did not remember from geography class. The trees were larger, they let very little light reach the floor which was covered only in leaves, and it was old. He did not know enough to know that there should not even be a young forest in this place, but he did know that a forest this old had not existed here for hundreds of years, if ever. He knew that it was the type of place where a boy his age should never go alone. He didn't care. There was nothing for him where he had come from and he didn't have anywhere else to go. His pace never even slowed and into that dark forest he walked until his shadow mingled with all the others and there was nothing left to see but an old silent forest.

A few days later the police got a missing child report from a local children's shelter about a kid who hadn't been seen for awhile. No one at the shelter knew how long he had been gone. It was a place notorious for not noticing when children went missing but this particular child was notorious for running away. They said that he usually came back on his own after a few days when he got too hungry to miss any more meals. This time he hadn't. The manager on duty was written up for not reporting the absent child earlier. The teacher told police that the child frequently walked out of class. She said that sometimes the child went to the library but more often went back to the shelter. She knew of no other place where he spent time. They found that the librarian hadn't seen him since the boy checked out an old fantasy book a few weeks ago. The librarian was expecting to see the boy soon because the book was a few days late and the child did not have a history of keeping them out past the due date. The police made a few halfhearted attempts to find out more about the child but after coming up with almost nothing they simply moved on to bigger problems. The truth was that children from these shelters ran away all the time. Sometimes they came back and sometimes they ended up in shelters somewhere else. This just seemed to be one of those children that no one cared about. He was quickly forgotten.

A few days later a farmer called in and reported seeing a set of child's footprints across one of his fields while planting his cotton. The report stated that the footprints left the road and crossed the field into a plain of grass that stretched for fifty miles before coming to other fields or small towns. The police called these towns and a few other farmers to ask if they had seen a small child they didn't recognized. None had. The report was written off as false when the detective assigned to the case found that the farmer called in at least a few times a month to report things such as gnomes raiding his garden, a coven of witches holding bonfires on his property once every third full moon, a tabby cat that regularly called him foul names, and more recently an old growth forest that appeared on the edge of his property only on foggy days. The detective quickly found that the farmer was the butt of most jokes that went around the station and that he was concidered by the whole town to be completely crazy. No one had ever backed up or found any proof to support the farmer's claims. The detective filed the case away and never thought about it again. The farmer never called in another report. Neither farmer nor child was ever heard from again. After a few years, when the plain of grass had taken over the plowed field, no on in town even remembered that there had been a farm there. Times were hard and there were only a few townsfolk left who hadn't passed on or moved to a bigger city. The police station closed down, the school was boarded up, and the only residents of either were mice who, with the help of water damage, quickly destroyed all records left behind.

The town no longer even exists in memory. Every now and then a car, lost due to a wrong turn, will drive down the dirt road that used to run through it and the passengers will look out at the tumble-down buildings and houses imagining that they see movement deep in the shadows past the broken glass. At the edge of the town they'll see an old wooden sign, almost unreadable, that says "Thanks for visiting Brooksville! Come back soon!". They'll have a laugh, the kids in the back will tell a few ghost stories, and eventually they'll find the Interstate again and be back on their way. After a few hours they'll all forget too. Places like this are easily forgotten.

This is where the story begins.

The Plan Developes

To continue on with my previous post, this is an update of what's going on with my newest writing project. Right now it is still very much in the spitballing stage. The premise is pretty well set, it's an idea that I've had at the back of my mind for years. I didn't think that I could pull if off back then and I'm not sure about it now but I figure it's time to give it a real shot. It's been developing itself in a way. It seems to have a sort of gravity with which it sucks in other ideas and attaches them to various parts of itself and now, four or five years later, I don't really recognize it anymore but it is much more interesting. It does, however, need vast amounts of work.

For instance, on of the problems with the whole gravity idea is that not only does it suck in original ideas but those borrowed from bits and pieces of other novels that I've read in the same time frame. I'm going to have to perform a sort of surgury to pull those bits out or at least change them enough so that they are my own. There's also the matter of the cast and crew. There are two or three main characters that I've got figured out pretty well but there are at least ten or fifteen holes that I've got to fill with fresh creations. There are probably more, but that's as far as I've gotten on the characters. I've got some good ideas developing themselves though. Ah, but that's not the end of the prewriting work I've got ahead of me.

The third big problem is the map. It has also been working itself out for a few years and I've got a good idea of what I want but there are a great many things that I have not researched yet. The anthropologies, meteorologies, histories, and geologies, to name a few, are still in the early planning stages. This will obviously be a rather large task.

Then there's the really hard questions. Even after I have all that other stuff figured out, I still have quite a few difficult problems to work out. Where does it start? Where does it end? How am I going to get from the start to the end? Will it be three books or five? I don't think one will take care of the whole thing. It's a little stressful, but still fun. The only real solution is to start writing and not stop till it's finished. Some of these things may even work themselves out in the process. The concensus among this crowd seems to be that there is really no excuse to not write at least a little every day. Whether it's on subject or off, good or bad, fun or not, the only way to do it is to keep going. I tend to agree with this. After all, there is always something to write about.

Back To Writing

It's time to start talking about the next project. I've been gearing myself up for it for a few months as I'm sure you can tell from some of the previous blogs. I haven't quite worked out the details on what the book will entail, but it should be fun. I'm considering this my self thrown pep rally. It's time to get worked up, excited, and inspired for the next marathon round of pouring myself into this lifestyle we call writing. This manuscript will be something new, quite a bit different, and definately more intense than any of my previous efforts. It's time to open some new doors in my mind.

I still have a good amount of research to do. I don't now quite enough about some of the ideas this book will include to be convincing. I've good work to do there. There are some ideas however that could be considered new, at least as far as fiction is concerned, so those I will just have to research in my own mind. That's a little bit more fun than the other type of research. The fabrication, at least for me, is one of the most enjoyable parts of writing.

Ah, the characters. Those wiley, self-destructive, selfish, ill-tempered, and almost always stubborn creations of mine will be the death of me. How do you create something or someone with a mind of their own and then convince them to do the things that you need them to do? I'm sure this is a common problem. They get away from me, they fight me, and sometimes they just take a flying leap off a cliff that I didn't even know was there. The worst part is that those are always the most interesting characters. It's the boring ones, the flat ones, that ones that just won't do anything that stick around. They just sit there all useless, staring at a wall, taking up space, eating all my food and refusing to perform. I just can't seem to inspire the dull ones and I can't control the exciting ones. Secretly I love every minute of it.

Then there's always the new map, or the new world itself if I'm extra ambitious. The map of this new land is going to be a major factor in the way the story itself plays out. If I'm going to make it a whole world then it's that much more complicated. It's akin to taking the compication of creation a person with all the intricacies that entails and multiply that by some unfathomably huge number. There's all the features of the land itself that will control borders, battles, travel, culture, and conflict just to name a few. Then you have to create languages, economies, politics, heirarchies, histories, intrigues, and put all of that together to create an epic story. It really helps to appreciate minds like Tolkein and George R. R. Martin doesn't it? As long as I'm dropping names of heroes lets add a few others. There's David Eddings before the Elder Gods series, Robert Jordan if he ever finishes, C. S. Lewis should have been at the top as well as Anne McKaffrey. Ursula K. LeGuin was a childhood favorite. I liked Nix and Phillip Pullman. My new hero of the past 5 years or so has been J. K. Rowling. There's a brilliant mind for you.

Anyway, to read a story by any of those authors is to feel a seemingly effortless flow of coherent thoughts all coming together over a tapestry of incredible complication. They do this through research, planning, and a talent for fabricating and keeping track of thousands of different ideas all at once. It takes an incredible amount of effort and thought. It takes years of effort. It takes a commitment to an idea that may or may not pan out to be what you thought it would but that commitment must hold true to the end regardless. It takes all of this and, in the end, a little bit of luck in that maybe that one agent somewhere will see something in your work that you saw all along and decides to take a chance on you. It sounds like an incredible task. It sounds, to me, like an enormous amount of fun. Imagine being one of the lucky ones and making a living at it. In a nutshell, there's my dream.

Timeline

Over the past few months I've been thinking a lot about the future and what it has in store for us. I'm trying to sift through all the possibilities in order to plan for the way I think things are probably going to go. It's a difficult challenge, especially when concidering the fact that many things up until now have not gone the way I expected. It's interesting to look back and see what I was thinking.

A year ago I was living with my girlfriend and thinking very seriously about asking her to marry me. That was terrifying but I couldn't think of any circumstance that would make me want to be with anyone else. As it turns out I made the right decision in this instance. Two weeks from today is our six month anniversary.

Two years ago I was a few weeks into my last year of school. I had no idea what I was going to do after that and I was spending most of my time among friends at a house that could only be called a hippy commune. It's name was Kingston and by itself has many a good story to go along with it. I had no job at this point, I had broken up with my future wife six or so months previously, and I was accomplishing very little in the way of progress. However, this was a time in my life that did me a lot of good. I learned what it would be like to live on very little money, I learned a lot about composting and gardening (we had both in the backyard), I made friends with two dogs named Hendrix and Pappy, I read a lot, bought a great many books from the used bookstore, and spent many an early spring evening sitting on the front porch drinking coffee and talking about everything we could think of. It was a good time, but I still hadn't gotten over the girl.

Three years ago I was living in a trailer with my best friend's girlfriend, I was not in school, I had just ended a two year relationship with a girl in California, I was working at a restaurant and a grocery store, and I was about two weeks away from going on my first date with my wife-to-be. That last part I had no clue about and it was definately not part of the plan. Lucky for me my plans hold very little sway over the way things actually work. Oh, I was also planning on spending a month or so that summer backpacking around Europe with my brother and my cousin. I had the plane ticket. What I couldn't get together was the rest of the money thanks to ongoing car issues. This would be the first of many trips to Europe that would fall through between then and now. Right now we're planning on going next summer. The issue is no longer the money, but the time.

Four years ago, roughly, I was driving down 82nd street in my Mercury Grand Marquis. It was a wonderful car, it was a beautiful clear morning, and I was the only car on the road for at least half a mile in either direction. I guess I was also not paying attention because an Oldsmobile Alero, a car that should have bounced off of mine like a plastic toy, decided to turn left off of a side street and that the best way to do it would be to cross a few lanes of traffic and ram into the side of mine. I think the theory was to use the force of impact to complete the turn and propel itself for a few miles without the accelerator, thus saving gas. Well, that car being as small as it is, it did in fact bounce of of mine. Pieces of it went everywhere, I think the engine evaporated, and all that was left was the shell of protection around the driver. Good engineering, lucky girl. The unlucky part was that the Alero was designed specifically, I think, to take on cars like the Grand Marquis. It's nose was shaped in such a way that when aimed at the side of one of these monsters it could pull a sort of suicide run, dig it's nose into the frame of that beast and let the beast's forward momentum bend that frame from nose to tail. So far as I can tell the best way to total one of the huge cars is to bend the frame. Mine was totalled. So was hers, but hers never had a chance. The point of all this being that it was the start car troubles that dramatically shaped my life for the next 4 years.

Five years ago, I dunno. Who can remember five years ago? Life was simpler then, I know that. I can't remember anything specific. Luke may have been in Spain, or California, I don't think he'd made in to Virginia yet. It was all good fun. It was easy. I had no troubles and plenty of extra money. It was also probably much less interesting. That may be why I can remember nothing specific. Ah well. The moral of this story is that even though you make lots of plans, or even if you make none, life seems to make its own. Things always seem to work out. Sometimes it's fun to look back. Look for stories about Kingston and the Hippy Life in a future installment. Maybe Soon!!

Remember Music?

It seems like a simple question until you turn on the radio and hear, one after another, awful bits of sound all bunched together and then called songs. For the most part these "artists" don't even write music about meaningful things anymore. It's all about strippers, lumps, bringing sexy back, and other topics not far from these. I remember when artists could not fabricate terms like Gwen's "Holla Back Girl" and pretend like people knew what she was talking about. I remember when people like Fergie could not turn their name into a song (Fergalicious) and pretend that this was in some way good music. I remember when weenies like Justin Timberlake were the people that music lovers made fun of because they just couldn't be taken seriously. Apparently America thinks that he can in fact bring sexy back. I didn't realize that it had gone anywhere. I also find it hard to believe that, as the first line of one of his new songs suggests, he could in any way be capable of writing a symphony.
It bothers me that music has come to this point. I realize that there are much bigger problems in this world but to me the state of America's music industry is a commentary on why many of these bigger problems exist. Our nation is told be the industry leaders what to like and like lemmings a great many Americans blindly jump off the cliff. This is something that occurs in many other industries. We follow their lead in clothing, jewelry, food, movies, and even energy. This state of commercialism is most evident during the holidays by which I mean year round since they have managed to stretch every holiday to run into the next. All you have to do is walk into a store to figure out which major money making holiday is a month or so around the bend. As Americans we complain about the gross waste of resources perpetrated by our government every year on seemingly rediculous things. The honest truth is that we seem to have little room for complaint. We are showing them by our example what we would do with the extra money.
But I digress. The music scene is what started this. There are still good artists that manage, against all odds, to make it in an industry that seems to try to shut them out. What brought me to actually write about it was the Grammys. Thats right, the American award given to the "best artists" for each category in a given year. It's almost sickening to know who won them this year. Artists like Gnarls Barkley and Mary J Blige took home awards while people with real talent such as Natalie Cole were among those who handed them out. The Dixie Chicks seemed to sweep the night and while I can admit they have talent I also believe it is the scandal they created that won them those awards. I guess the point is that to win a grammy what you really seem to need is to be the most controversial. In other words you need to make the least intelligent music possible. The less thought necessary, the better.
However, amidst all the trash that polutes the airwaves there are still the occasional new talents. Once Carrie Underwood gets out from under the corrupting influence of American Idol and is set loose with her phenomenal voice she stands a real chance of making good country music. I have not decided about Corinne Bailey Rae yet, but I think she's got potential. At the very least she's got the voice. The industry is in a bad state and I'm secretly hoping that through the internet which they hate and through their own failure to produce good music they will cause themselves to implode. Then it will be like the old days when you had to have real talent, not physically but musically, to get on the radio.