Over time my views on different facets of writing have changed, in some ways contradicting other, previous posts on this blog:
Here’s my past view on this. Things changed from a quote by Stephen King. I don’t like King as a person thanks to a meeting years ago, but I still think he was right about this:
Stephen King
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. …”
I modify this a bit: I write –and read — fiction and non.
Each one uses different ‘muscles’, different genres. different styles.
So: I read both now, each with their respective style.
I posted two differing views on this here and here.
Well, I don’t write anything for free like Wil, with exceptions: I still write for the newsletter at work, this blog, and Medium… but when I join their Partner Program, I have a chance to earn on it.
I may seem wishy-washy, but I have a method.
I haven’t posted here in a long while. Medium with it’s bigger audience lured me away. I’m trying to fix that…
Cue the Ennio Morricone music…
The Gor novels are mostly forgotten nowadays (although Politically Incorrect Games [P.I.G.] have released a Gor game; l have to find the email). I’m not surprised. The series began well, got bad very fast, and became worse after.
Gor is also called Counter-Earth. It’s in the same orbit as Earth, just equidistant on the opposite side of the sun, so we’ll never see it. The planet has a lower gravity than Earth.
The civilizations are a mixture of Roman, Greek, Native American and Viking, other cultures too, transplanted by spaceship from our Earth by an insectoid race that they call the Priest Kings. They are allowed to advance in architectural, agricultural and medical skills (including life extension), but are forced to remain primitive in the fields of transportation, communication and weaponry (at approximately the level of Classical Mediterranean civilization) due to restrictions on technology imposed by the Priest-Kings. This limitation is imposed to ensure the safety of both the Priest-Kings, as well as the other indigenous and transplanted beings on Gor who would otherwise possibly come to harm due to humans’ belligerent tendencies.
This was the first novel. Written by John Norman — the pseudonym of Dr. John Lange, a professor of philosophy and a classical scholar — it drew a lot from the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (although poorly marketed, the movie John Carter was based on the series.
John Norman’s main character here, Tarl Cabot, was loosely inspired by John Carter (I may be wrong about that).
This was the Good. Then it went bad, and quickly.
“I’m not for censorship but I am for strategies which marginalize stuff that works to objectify women and suggests women enjoy being beaten.-
Michael Moorcock
Around the fourth book, it got its own style. Unfortunately, not a good one: women were often slaves, often beaten until they were docile and submissive (often by the hero of the novel) and fell in love with the men who beat them.
This may make them popular among the alt-right, but for those of us more enlightened, it’s disgusting.
I stopped reading the series then, but from what I’ve read on Wikipedia, it gets worse.
Science fiction/fantasy author Michael Moorcock has suggested that the Gor novels should be placed on the top shelves of bookstores
Later books became (I’m quoting Wikipedia here) “sadomasochistic pornography”. The author claimed to draw inspiration from philosophy, Earth history, Homer, Freud
Surprisingly, this series not only got reprinted in several languages, and is a strong seller in Ebooks… but before I did research for this article, I’d mostly forgotten.
Like What You Read? Get More!
Courage (for Hugh MacLennan) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)G
(First posted on Medium.)
Gord Downey, the singer-frontman of the band The Tragically Hip, lost his battle with brain cancer last week. He was 53.
Last night, CTV here in Canada aired the documentary about his farewell tour across Canada, ending in his hometown Kingston, Ontario.
Many Americans don’t know the band because they are more a Canadian phenomenon.
Full disclosure here: in the past, I wasn’t a huge fan of the band — but as I listened to all of their hits, I realized that I WAS.
Before anybody else points it out: writing songs is hard. I can be poetic in my writings, but I’m not good at poetry… and songwriting is even more difficult. I tried to write some in the past, but I wasn’t very good.
Gord Downey wrote songs for over 30 years — for 14 albums and more EPs and singles.
Even more admirable: his body was failing more and more every day; he still performed a concert tour across Canada — plus he performed 90 songs, where most people sing 45 songs at most.
He was one of the hardest working men in the music industry, and one who used his celebrity to bring more notice to the mistreatment of our First Nations brethren.
Spring Cleaning
After the last time that I said that I intended to update this blog more often, I stayed away even longer!
Mea culpa – – but this time, there’s a reason. A good one: since May of this year (2017) I’ve been part of a group that posts on Medium. It’s just like blogging, but it has a much larger potential audience. I will still post here (in fact I’ll re-post relevant content here), but the greater exposure appeals to me.
Here’s my profile on their site.
I also put a new design on this blog, after using the same one for ages. The new one has much less clutter. Do you like it?
I haven’t updated this blog with new content in a long time. Both my short story and my novel have been stalled. I hope to get a habit of regular writing started again.
The blog was due to burnout. Although this blog I’ve been publishing on for more than 3 years, I’ve grown exhausted at continuing that schedule proved to be tiring.
I’ve begun a new content calendar to get this (and other social media) onto a more regular posting schedule. In the past, I just posted online at random times. Hopefully, I won’t from now on.
To help me to post here more often, I’ll prepare several posts before I launch them here, so I’ll have a bank of pieces to post every week. In the past, I would prepare one piece at a time; as a result, I would always have the pressure to update while the content suffered. This way, that pressure will be lessened.
That’s one piece of my new writing strategies:
Short story collection (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
These too sat around untouched for a long time. Far too long.
The reason is also proof that I’m truly a writer: self-doubt.What is that? It’s something that many other writers have experienced (including the far-better-than-I Neil Gaiman): a voice in my head – and in many others – says that we’re not good enough, we can’t finish what we start either.
English writer Neil Gaiman. Taken at the 2007 Scream Awards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The voice is crippling. I didn’t touch my novel for over a year as a result.
Two things are helping The first is one we’ve always used for NaNoWriMo: ignore it.
There we call it our Internal Editor and do our best to not pay attention to it.
The other thing that I’m doing is that I joined a group called Ninja Writers. They have a pretty active Facebook Group [here], and also a Patreon that I’ve joined.
Ninja Writers is based off a philosophy espoused by the late Ray Bradbury:
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens.
Photo of Ray Bradbury. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The basic idea is that every day I write for 10 minutes and I also read for another 10. The idea isn’t that new. I’m a member of another Group called 10 Minute Novelists [here], and I bought a book about starting a similar writing habit of 8 minutes per day.
Regardless of the amount of time, the important thing is to build up a regular habit of writing. I have to rebuild mine. Plus: so far, it helped me to finish the first draft of my novel, and to break my inertia on the short story for my e-mail list.
I thank Ninja Writers for that. I’m back to regular writing because of it.
I realize that I’ve said I was restarting before. I hope that this time it works.
I’ve been suffering “blog burnout” for some time. To counteract it I’m rewriting older posts with some new content as well.
If I was under a contract to a big company, I could only write the books that I was under contract for. I could write other things, but I’d likely have to sit on them for a different deal,= or have to publish them under another publisher, under a pseudonym.
As an indy, I can publish whatever I want whenever I choose to.
Example: I’m writing a short story for my email list (set in the ‘world’ of my novel) and have the outline for a non-fiction work after I’m done with the novel, as well as notes for another series… my mind is busy!
Independent Truck Company logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If I was under a contract to a big company, I would be hampered to writing in just one genre, and just one style. If I was signed for one series, I would be forced to write for that series alone. If it was for novels (it often is) I could only write novels and not short stories or non-fiction (the exception being if they help to drive interest to your contracted novels, and if they don’t affect your contract time).
[Of course, Steven King, James Patterson, and J.K. Rawlings are exceptions to this rule.]
As an indie pub author, on the other hand, I can write and publish whatever I want and when I want to. I can start one series, then another, then put out an unrelated short story or a non-fiction work. I have that freedom.
See what I said above.
People under contract to a big publisher have no control over how their work is presented.
Indie pub authors control every aspect. The cover art is what they chose, as are the fonts (for a hardcopy book; for eBooks it’s still not under your control) and even illustrations inside the book.
You can print on demand and/or e-publish on Kindle/Nook/epub/Smashwords/whatever you choose.
[If you pick the Kindle KDP program you can’t try another for 90 days..]
Audiobook? Indy Pub authors can do this at will, and profit from it. Authors on contract can too — if they’re on the contact to get paid for it. Otherwise, the publisher might produce one, but all profits go to them.
To play Devil’s Advocate, there is a big negative: all the costs (art, editing, advertising, etc.) come to you. After your first work sells, you can set money aside for the next one, but that first one may cost a lot.
Novels in a Polish bookstore (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The one minus doesn’t outweigh the positives, though.
Here are my reflections on the year passed…
I haven’t posted here since early October. Blog burnout is as self-doubt in writing. I’m experiencing both at the same time.
Lucky me.
2016 has been a bad year for many of us. Music icons have died. Many. Celebrities in many other fields died. Just 3 days ago as I write these words
Carrie Fisher at WonderCon 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Princess Leia from Star Wars, Carrie Fisher, died of a heart attack. A day later
her mother Debbie Reynolds died of a major stroke (though many say it was caused by heartbreak).
There were also far too many terrorist slayings (anything more than 0 is too many). Also, many hate crimes including the slayings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
I won’t even mention the recent US Election results… sort of. I won’t go into them in detail, a) because this isn’t a politics blog and b) a good way to burn bridges with potential readers would be to tick them off with partisan rants — so I won’t do any. All I will say is that it was an ugly election, and I hope never to see one like it again anytime soon.
In terms of my writing, as I said 2016 was not great for me either. with these words, you may be wondering if this is meant only as a gloomy post. I’m only explaining part of why 2016 is a year we’d all like to forget, me too. I’ve already started steps to make 2017 a better year for me.
I already have an article ready for a friend’s fanzine, and I’m working on a second one for another issue. I will =use this to galvanize me to relaunch my own zine from dormancy and to write a few letters for other zines that I’m a member of.
I’ve created a new editorial calendar to bolster the regular posting of updates on this blog, to get the newsletter for my mailing list more regular… and (I hope) to help me to get my short story done and my novel after it.
Goodbye to 2016. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out – and may 2017 be a good year!
My short story and novel – and the series that they’re a part of – supernatural dramedy, is fairly new to fiction (although technically Janet Evanovich does it in all but name), but it has a long history on television.
The word ‘dramedy’is a combination of ‘drama’ and ‘comedy’. As a genre, it combines them too: the subject matter is dramatic, with moments of humor mixed in.
English: Joss Whedon at the 2010 Comic Con in San Diego (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Joss Whedon has made his career in this genre; see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and more… but there were other series before them.
One of the most popular (although there were others) was LA Law. It ran from Sept. 15, 1986, to May 19, 1994.
David E. Kelley was showrunner until the end of the fifth season of the show, and it also gave new life to the career of actor Susan Day (Laurie Partridge on The Partridge Family) as Grace von Owen.
The series was set in the fictional law firm McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney, and Kuzak.
What makes this an example of dramedy: the show deals with serious issues (AIDS, LGTBQ issues,racism,domestic violence, etc.) but wrapped around the issues were running gags and other bits of humor.
For example partner Chaney dies of a heart attack in the opening of the first episode, but at first, nobody knows because all we see is his hand clutching a tax manual. At his funeral, we learn that the secretary he last hired is transgender and that they met originally at a gay bar (this revelation comes to his wife just now). He paid for the secretary’s surgery, and the hire was meant to be the first real world test. One of the surviving partners fires her immediately due to his transphobia.
(This was in the late 1980s, and the firing character was an over-sexed womanizer. Regardless, I don’t find that funny now.)
This series was co-created by Steven Bochco, and it had a large ensemble cast. Rigger, Mortiz and Shivver doesn’t have as big a cast, but there is an ensemble nonetheless.
I’ll continue this in my next post.
Not everyone does this, so I’m not making this concrete advice — but you may find it helpful to put you in the writing mood…
To get into the mindset for writing fiction, this may seem redundant but try freewriting.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on what it is.
Doing it is not hard:
icon for notepad (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The purpose is just to get your mental pathways open to writing after. It’s a warmup process.
I made a PDF of tools for this on Windows, Linux or Mac OSX. Join my list and I’ll send it to you. Update: it’s now a Checklist.
