Daily Archives: December 2, 2012

More of that dream crap

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Lots more dreaming of the usual variety. Super intense, wake up soaked in sweat and completely disoriented, takes a while to remember who I am and what is real.

I had to make a concerted effort to tell myself “I don’t have to deal with any of that any more because none of that was real” this morning. That kind of thing frightens me terribly.

Perhaps it;s different for people with rich, deep personal lives which contain plenty of real life stimulation and input, and thus the distinction between the dream world of imagination and the real world is comfortably sharp and distinct, and their dreams do not haunt them.

But for me, with my life already at least half imaginary, with days spent on the Internet playing video games and chatting with people thousands of miles away, intense dreams like that frighten me so much because I feel like the line between my imagination and reality is already dangerously thin, and so anything which stresses it too much makes me feel like am in danger of entering my own personal hell : being trapped inside my own mind forever, with no way out.

One nice thing about being as old as I am : I am well out of the usual age range of the onset of schizophrenia, one of the definitions of which (there’s many) is : a breakdown of the mind’s ability to tell what is imagined from what is real.

Usually, if you are not showing signs by the age of 25 (coincidentally, the exact age when your age-related brain development ends), you are out of the woods re: being schizophrenic.

Being damn near 40, I am reasonably sure I will not go there. Or at least, I am rationally sure I am out of the woods.

But that does not eliminate the very powerful subjective feeling that I am at constant risk of a descent into utter madness, and hence, I live every day clinging to sanity by my fingers while dangling over a cliff face overlooking the pits of Hell.

Maybe that is an entirely false idea, and if I “let go” I would not fall into the heart of darkness, but just come to Earth, safe and sound and calm and collected and no longer so freaked out by life.

But that is just not going to happen. At least, not all at once. Perhaps it is this terror of madness that is truly driving me insane… I don’t know.

But it is an integral part of my psyche now, and I do not know how to live a natural life. I am my own construction, artificial and illusory, with thought substituted for emotion and a constant imposition of artificial concepts of order onto a living, breathing, organic being.

Thus, I craft my own cage, and squeeze the life out of myself, all in the name of trying to make sense of things. Truly, it is tragically absurd and absurdly tragic to be me.

But you had probably figured that out by now.

And the sad thing is, I will probably go right back to sleep when I am done this journal entry. Apparently, my dreams are not done with me yet. I am still quite tired and need more rest.

Hopefully, I will have enough time to get some editing done today too. It should not be a problem. I can’t imagine I will sleep all afternoon. But I figured I should get the day’s blogging done first.

I suppose another sort of person might think “Well, you are editing, do you really need to keep blogging as well? Isn’t the editing enough?”

And another kind of person might be able to make that trade. But not me. I can only maintain any sort of discipline if I make it absolutely rigid and unforgiving. And that means writing new words every day. A thousand words a day minimum. Anything else I do has to be in addition to that.

Otherwise, I will lose all discipline and end up sliding into a steep decline, at the bottom of which I will be even more depressed than usual because I am no longer even writing any more, and I will feel even more pointless, useless, and futile than ever before.

So, a thousand words a day, come what may. I do not always feel like doing it, but I am always glad I did. Even just bleating out my injuries like this does me a lot of good.

Editing, on the other hand… get used to hearing this… is so damn hard. Writing, all I have to do is… write. Editing, I actually have to start thinking about the work as a whole, and that is very hard for me.

So I suspect I largely… won’t. There is no point in shouldering a burden you know will crush you, and so I will be a while working on my editing muscles before I can handle taking on the whole thing at once.

Instead, I will just go through and make what changes I can. Tighten up the language, correct continuity errors, proofread, and so on. Little stuff.

The bigger picture (usually my strong suit) will have to wait. I will go forward on the assumption that while I can’t guarantee the whole thing is brilliant as a whole, it is all good enough to be fun to read and interesting to get into, and let the rest sort itself out.

Perhaps that is all I can reasonably expect of myself. No magnum opus of tight, muscular prose building to a mind blowing thematic conclusion that propels me into the annals of literary giants and changes the world and how we look at it forever.

Just a good read that leaves you feeling good even after you are done, and makes you eager to spend more time in my little sandbox.

Put that way, it seems like a much more reasonable goal, and one I think I can achieve.

I will leave it up to future scholar to figure out what the hell I was talking about all this time.

What’s up with me now

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Wow, it feels weird to be back on the mic after a whole month of just writing prose. I feel like I am dancing after a whole month of singing, and it is going to take me some time to get my feet back under me.

So what have I been doing? Well, writing another whole damned book, for one. This one is called The Road To Amarlea and it’s about two friends and their trip to the magical city of Amarlea.

It is meant to be funny fantasy a la Terry Prachett’s Discwold series, Robert Aspirin’s Myth series, Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, and the Malady of Magicks series by Craig Shaw Gardner.

Of the above, the closest to my style (and that is not an accident) is Pratchett. And not just in the obvious Douglas Adams-ish authorial voice. I hope I also put the sort of warmth and wit into my writing as he does. I would never claim to be as good as him (though I long to be), but I hope to emulate his gentle yet keen wit, his lovable quirky characters, his deft interweaving of the comic with the profound, and of course, his massive financial success.

Mostly that last bit, really. (Joking, people. Relax.)

I am worried, however, because I am pretty sure that I sort of forgot to be funny for long stretches of the book. I got really into telling other parts of the story and I am afraid I wandered rather far afield, as I am wont to do, especially when I head out into the writer’s wilderness with nothing but a few characters, a couple of scenes, and a vague destination in mind.

That is something I will have to try to fix in editing. Which is where I am now : editing the damn thing.

And having just edited two parts of it, I can say this definitely : editing is so much less fun than writing, it’s not even funny.

Writing the rough draft is fun. Very arduous fun, but fun nevertheless. I get to really stretch and expand and strengthen my imagination, work on my authorial voice, make up what happens next each day, spin stories, make up funny stuff, spend time in a world of my own making, and best of all, create.

That’s what I like to do. I am a creator, an artist, a maker, a progenitor. It is that act of creative birth that motivates me. I have so much creativity inside me, so many words and thoughts and ideas and emotions crying for release, that when I finally get around to letting them out through these busy typing fingers of mine, the relief is so profound that when I am done, the selfish and shortsighted side of me wants to just roll over and go to sleep.

Yes, that was a sexual metaphor. Sorry about that. What can I say, I am a man. Everything is about releasing our energies into the world to us.

But of course, this whole tendency to want to forget what I have done and move on to the next thing (what a pig!) of mine is not going to lead to a satisfying and lucrative writing career.

Nobody pays the big bucks (or even the small change) for someone’s rough draft. All the writing books say that you have to make it as good as you possibly can before you even think about sending it to a publisher. And so even though it goes against every grain of my lazy progenitor nature, I have to cuddle up with my book and stay awake long enough to edit the goddamned thing.

And I don’t like it. But I will do it.

And when I am done, I will make the edited version available to you, the readers, and then, God willing and the crick don’t rise, I will turn it into an eBook and sell it online.

I plan to fix up last year’s book too, and make it available as an eBook.

Or maybe not. I would prefer to go the eBook route, because I honestly want as little between me and reader as possible, for both financial and artistic reasons.

As a writer, all that matters to me is connecting with my audience. I have developed a definition of a writer as a person with a desperately strong need to communicate with people without them being in the same room. And that describes me pretty well.

After all, if I wasn’t shy, I guess I would just talk to people. Maybe.

Anyhow, I would rather sell a book directly to the audience with any goddamned gatekeepers in the way. Now that it is possible to do so (without needing to have the capital to self-publish), I view the entire traditional publishing industry as a completely unnecessary impedance to the artist/art consumer relationship, which is all that has ever mattered to art.

But… there is this little voice inside my head that says “But what if a big publisher WOULD publish it. What if you could have traditional success. Books with your name on them sitting on people’s shelves. Nice gat advances in the bank. Book tours all over the world, all expenses paid. You could HAVE ALL THAT. ”

And that sounds pretty good. I think my writing might not be all that polished yet, but I think the stories I tell are good ones, and that is more important than formal perfection anyhow.

So perhaps I will hedge my bets by sending one book to a publisher, and the other, I will eBook.

And seeing as I went to considerable trouble to retain first publishing rights of my latest magnet opus, I suppose it would make sense to send that one out to the Book Police.

My hope would be that if I have enough eBook success, I will attract a real world publisher, and have the best of both worlds.

So wish me well folks! Seeya tomorrow.