Last Two Months

August was a blur as I binged five and a half seasons of Outlander after returning from Scotland. I tried to get back into Manifest, but quickly realized what a huge waste of time this low quality show was and while I don’t regret watching so many episodes of it while traveling throughout England and Scotland, it was also really dumb. Regardless, burning through Outlander made me wonder about the novels, made me wonder about Diana Galbadon. So I got the first one and started down the rabbit hole of Galbadon’s online presence, and what the what? She’s coming to Surrey, BC? And what? There’s this fiction conference that’s been literally 17 minutes away from my house for the last thirty years? And authors like Mary Robinette Kowal, C.L. Polk, and Diana Galbadon attend almost every year? What the fuck is going on here? I registered.

September was quite possibly one of the most miserable months in my entire freelancing career as a copywriter. I closed the gig before I left for the U.K. So around July after I wrapped up the UTI project. I just needed money in the door. But I had shook hands with the devil. This product was a weight loss product based on seaweed. There were just not enough studies to back up its effectiveness. So I spent weeks dreading it, putting it off, picking at it, trying to do my best without swiping my entire last project, but still cannibalizing a lot of it. I hated myself. I hated what I was doing with my life. I hated every minute of it. I would sit down at Starbucks at 6am on Sundays, do nothing for two hours, and in the last 60 minutes I would write. Or really, copy, paste, and adapt/tweak. I missed the Sept. 20 deadline. I missed the EOM deadline. I keep telling my client it’s coming, sorry for the delays, just a few more days. And it would take another week. It was just miserable.

I finally submit the project in October. I am destroyed. Like a completely broken man. I would go in Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, handle all these meetings, but nap in the morning, nap in the afternoon, nap whenever I could between meetings. It was like I had gone on this grueling expedition, hacking through jungles, braving the arctic, sloshing through monsoons… for thirty days straight, and finally got home and needed to sleep for a month to recover.

The positive was the fiction learning. Once I understood what the second Save the Cat book was about (Save the Cat Goes to the Movies), that it was really what Brandon Sanderson was saying about promise>progress>payoff… I began to fully understand what was going on. Plot threads are threads you can weave together (as many as you like) to create a story. Because of stupid fucking Hero’s Journey and Save the Cat… I kept thinking EVERY story of EVERY SIZE had to follow these dumb plot beats… when in reality… those plot beats condense, expand, and intermingle as you need them based on what you’re trying to accomplish. So I reread Save the Cat Goes to the Movies again, but this time with a much keener eye towards categorizing the different plot threads and picking up the plot beats in each one. IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW. I also burned through all of season eleven of Writing Excuses. Got their take on what they call “elemental genre”, but is really plot threads. I’ve been mashing them together into a guide that’s useful to me, but leaving also leaving it here.

I still have no clear idea what I want to do with my online life. I think crashcopy.com might be it. I think a straightforward newsletter might be it. Maybe some mini, 90 minute classes like Justin Welsh. Copywriting and Freelancing. Maybe Tarot. And just leave it at that and drive tons of traffic and build the list. I really don’t want to keep complicating this, waffling, and being indecisive. I paid D.R. $850 for a consulting call and he basically told me to NOT ghostwrite and build courses and cohorts. It wasn’t so much a waste of money as a sobering expensive call.

Anyway – October 20th rolls around and the weekend at SIWC was such a much needed event for me. Just hanging out and being around other authors and writers. Being in an immersive event and not just watching videos and listening to podcasts in the car in spurts. Three days of nothing but fiction. Talking about it. Thinking about it. Planning it. Meeting new people, fast friends, and joining new Discord groups because of it. And last night, I pulled the trigger on joining MRK’s Patreon/Discord. It feels right. I couldn’t sleep properly at all last night. Went to bed at 1AM, rolled around, maybe dozed off, but was up again at 5am. My brain is just buzzing with anticipation. It’s buzzing with that same feeling of newness, uncertainty, and instability as I had in mid 2009 when I went into freelancing, with the arrogant determination I will succeed. I want this. I want this so bad. I’m well aware that it’s a black swan. I’m well aware that 90% of the published authors I met at SIWC, hell, 95% of them are not full-time and even if they are, they are supplementing with Patreons, side gigs like voice acting for audio books, like teaching at Universities as creative writing professors, as podcasters. Hell, probably only Diana Galbadon is rolling in it out of everyone there. I’m keenly aware of the situation and I’m walking in with eyes open and I still want it. This is what I’ve wanted since the first time I attempted to become a fiction writer in 2006. The first time I read Paolo Bacigalupi’s Pop Squad. When I was reading ASOIAF in 2006. Hell, as far back as 2005 when I wanted to break into comics like my heroes like Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Ed Brubaker.

Both attempts in 2006-2008, and 2015-2017, interrupted by life. business, reality. The second attempt mired by doing everything but the writing of fiction: running a podcast, a critique group, building out a platform when I didn’t need one.

Anyway - I pulled out this journal for a totally different reason, not to reflect on the last three months. At SIWC, MRK said that a beginner should aim for a short story that’s ~4k words. It’s short enough to be a story, and short enough that a publisher might give a first-timer a chance. I’m taking this to heart. I just went through all the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon award winners over the last seven years. Identified the ones that are in this range. (Plus a few that are not). I’ve printed out ten of them and I’m going to study them. BUT, I want to set proper intentions before I do that.

OK here’s what I’m thinking…

So let’s not stray too far and focus on this.

And here are the stories: