Year: 2014 (page 38 of 61)

Over there? That’s your gravestone.

It’s there, on the hill. Or in the valley. Maybe under a cherry blossom tree or by a babbling creek. Or maybe you’re a sack of kitty-litter-looking ashes on a mantle somewhere. It doesn’t much matter because, drum roll please, you’re dead.

Or, rather, you’re going to be dead. One day.

No, I’m not threatening you. I don’t have to. Life paired with time have together earned that pleasure. Unless you’re some kind of vampire, you were born with a ticking clock whose watchface was turned inward so that none can see it.

You are totally going to die.

I’m not Miriam Black. I don’t know when. Might be 50 years from now. Or ten. Or ten weeks, days, minutes. I certainly don’t know how. Cancer might juice your bowels. A hunk of frozen shit might fall off a 747 turbine and crush you in your recliner. Bear attack. Meth overdose. Choke on a hot wing. Stroke. Heart attack. Robot uprising. No fucking clue. And I don’t want to know the specifics. I don’t need to know the specifics because we are all given over to the universality of a limited mortality. The one aspect of our lives that is utterly and irrevocably shared is death.

That’s grim shit, I know.

I’ve spent a goodly portion of my life worrying about death. Or, more to the point, about how it’ll get me. I picture death less as a comical specter and more as the black dog of myth, always hounding my steps, ducking out of sight as I look for it, but always regaining my scent and waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Sometimes this manifested as a kind of hypochondria, a condition no doubt exacerbated by a Reader’s Digest Medical Guidebook I found in my house when I was around 10 years old, a book whose graphic flowcharts aimed to help you discern the truth of your symptoms — though of course they usually ended up convincing me I had some kind of rare tropical doom parasite. (For a while I seriously thought I had worms in my face. For no reason other than my teeth had left marks on the inside of my cheeks and became convinced that these divots were WORM TUNNELS. So, y’know, thanks Reader’s Digest.)

If it wasn’t hypochondria plaguing me, it was sheer existential terror. The realization that one day everything I know and everything that I am would one day hit an invisible wall and drop off into a deep, black sea trench, never to be reclaimed. And maybe never remembered — after all, all those who care about me would one day be dead, too.

I know. WHEE, right?

There comes a point when all this either was going to keep pinning me to the ground like a heavy boot or it was going to be the thing that I could push past or even use as a springboard to fling my dopey ass forward. One day it occurred to me that this revelation about death could be viewed as something representative of freedom. A grim, unruly freedom, one with a somewhat grisly underpinning, but freedom just the same. Because we all share this thing. We all share the reality of an impending death. We are all dying. Right now. All part of a cycle of birth, life, decay, death, all part of the washing machine tumble of chaos and order, structure and entropy, light and dark.

None of us — not a single one — are promised tomorrow.

We share that because we share the possibility of death.

But we share something else, too.

We share This Fucking Moment Right Fucking Here.

This one. The one with the masking tape across it and the permanent marker signifying:

NOW.

We all get now.

We all get the moment in which we exist.

A lot of you are writers. (Or “aspiring” writers, a term I hate so bad it causes a sudden chafing of my testicular region as if some surly ghost were rubbing a spectral bootbrush against my nads even as I sit here and type.)  And whenever I talk to writers and we get down to the nitty gritty of what they’re doing or hope to one day accomplish, they’re often mired in a sense of fear. Paralyzed sometimes by the what if’s and the big blinky question marks that look as much like a swooping scythe as they do a piece of punctuation. And a lot of writers are forward-thinking or future-leaning, expecting that the day will come that everything will work itself out and life’s magic highway will present them with an endless series of green lights…

…and they’ll finally get to do what they want to do.

My father lived his life in preparation for his retirement. Set everything up so that he could retire a bit early, move out West, and live his remaining years with the pleasurable, simple life for which he had waited. Of course, he died a few years into that retirement — so, while he had the privilege of living some of his dream, it sure wasn’t much when seen in the shadow of an entire life prepared for it. Too little time in the sun, too long in the anticipation of it.

Writers, artists, anybody: you are not promised that time.

You are promised right now.

I’ve said this before and I like to give a lot of these go forth and do it, please excuse my Doc Marten firmly ensconced in your spongy squat-grotto talks, and this one probably isn’t all that different from things you may have heard me say before. But it’s a thing I sometimes like to remind myself, and since this blog is primarily me-yelling-at-me, it’s a thing I’m going to remind you about, too.

You’re going to die, writer-types.

But you have now, right now, so use it.

And you may think that this advice for the aspiring-types only, for those novitiates on the Sacred Penmonkey Order, but it’s not. It’s for you story-seasoned word-brined motherfuckers, too. Because writers with careers short and long, we sometimes get a little lost in the weeds. Lost in things outside of us. Trends and markets, industries and Amazon rankings. We find ourselves jealous of other writers or fearful of the uncomfortable arranged marriage between the forces of art and commerce. Sometimes we forget that we have things we want to do, stories we want to tell, and we lose that in that the briar-tangle of uncertainty and anxiety and existential unease. Because just as we can as humans worry about the very nature of our existence, we can worry about our existence as writers, too. We worry about how long we’ll be allowed to do what we do. We wonder when someone will figure out that we’re stowaways on this ship, imposters at this party, strangers in our own chosen lives.

None of that really matters. I mean, it matters in little ways — in intellectual, commercial ways. But it doesn’t always help you to tell the tales you want to tell. It doesn’t always force that quantum entanglement between your ass molecules and the chair protons so that you can create some motherfucking art quarks, does it?

You can’t control a lot of the things you’re worried about.

You can maybe adjust them, or nudge them.

But you can’t control publishing. Or the audience. Or bookstores.

You can’t control whether a fridge-sized shit-glacier will drop off a plane and kill you.

What you can control is the height of your chair. You can control a little of your comfort as you sit at the desk — or stand, if you prefer. You can control which word processor you use, or which notebook you prefer. You can control what words you put down, in what order, and what story grows up from those words. You can control the work. That’s yours. Everything else is open to your occasional influence, but the one thing you can control is that you are writing this book.

And you have that control right now.

In this moment.

Not tomorrow.

Not in ten years.

Because you don’t know what happens then.

You do know that one day, it’ll all be over. And I can’t speak to what comes after — Heaven, Hell, Hades, Happy Hunting Grounds, Toledo — but that’s not the point. You don’t live for the end. You live for the moment. You live for this thing you want to do.

So, do it.

Right now.

You’re temporary.

Use that to create something permanent — or, at least, closer to permanent than you.

Let death motivate you. Let your inevitable demise impel you forward.

Go. Create something. Be the best version of yourself. Now. Here. This very second.

While you’re still alive.

So, heyyyyy.

I’ve been sitting on this for — *checks watch* — maybe a little while now, but…

Ahem.

Blackbirds is in development at Starz as a television show.

Brought to life by amazing creative humans David Knoller and John Shiban.

News at Deadline here.

News at Hollywood Reporter here.

No guarantee you’ll see it happen, of course, but I can tell you that what they’ve put together so far is an amazing — and appropriately faithful — adaptation of the book. They grok Miriam. Further, Starz is a helluva network. They’re a crafty, confident, and capable company.

All kinds of stuff I can’t really talk about yet, but fingers crossed this happens.

*stares at you until you cross all your fingers*

TOES, TOO, C’MON.

*stares more*

Anyway.

If you haven’t checked out Blackbirds yet, well, hey, now’s a good time:

Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

What I’m trying to say is, my new family doctor has huge hands.

Huge.

Oh, wait, my notes are out of order.

Let’s rewind a little.

So, my father died from prostate cancer.

*checks notes*

I’m pretty sure this post is supposed to be at least a little bit funny, but that’s not a promising start, is it? Still, persevere we must. So: my father had prostate cancer, and my uncle had it, too. Father, dead. Uncle alive. Difference is, of course, that one got checked out, the other didn’t, and I don’t think it’d be a huge spoiler warning to tell you which was which, but I’m happy to leave that puzzle up to you. My father did not have insurance because, drum roll please, he had preexisting conditions (high blood pressure), which upon retirement from his job of many eons meant he would’ve exhausted his savings just to pay for insurance. So, he skipped it for a few years in the hope that he’d reach Medicare without any grave conditions.

Grave being something of a pun, there, I guess.

Jeez, I swear this gets funny.

Point is, he died, and with him and my uncle both having had that particular brand of cancer, I am considered in the high-risk category for the disease. As such, I have to get checked every few years, which means, y’know, not to put too fine a point on it —

Finger in butt.

That’s just how that goes. Assfinger. *uncorking sound* That, plus a blood test, is how a doctor figures out if you have cancer all up in there. I’ll get this out of the way so you don’t think I’m misleading you: I do not have prostate cancer, to my or my doctor’s knowledge.

I do, however, want to tell you about this test.

Because my new family doctor — like, I just saw him for the first time last week — has enormous hands. I didn’t think to look before all this, erm, occurred. My previous doctor in the same office was a woman and did not happen to have huge hands. In retrospect, actually, her hands seem like delicate flowers — like little dandelion stems, thin and wonderfully flexible. But new doc? Hands that could pop a volleyball. Tree-trunk fingers with lug-nut knuckles.

Here’s how the test goes:

Get up. Drop trou. Drop boxers. Unlock the chastity padlock that guards the treacherous expanse between the Balls-to-Butt Bridge, thus revealing the entrance to the Mines of Rectalia.

Then, hunch forward. On elbows.

At this point, the doctor hunkers down back there and starts… you know, having a look. He figured that, whilst back there, he’d check everything out, given that folks rarely get a very pronounced or described look at their own buttholes. When you think about it, that particular little magical asterisk is completely far and away from our own eyes — it’s the Perth, Australia to the New York City of our eyeballs. It’s way the fuck down under. And compressed, too, by scads of flesh. So, Doc thought he’d check the whole landscape out back there, make sure nothing had gone direly wrong.

“Your anus looks great!” he said, and I add that exclamation point because this new doctor has a way to make everything sound like a triumph, like my excellent anus was a victory for mankind.

Hey, a little lipstick goes a long way, Doc.

He also said that my anal muscles have “good snap,” which I assume means they are like the rubber bands you find around bundles of asparagus rather than, say, a piece of gum that has been chewed so long it has lost all of its cohesion. Good snap. It made me think of the sound you get when you bite into a really good hot dog? The pop of the casing? Not an ideal image during this particular intrusion, but the mind is a funny place.

At this point the doctor, bored with the appetizers, decided to go right for the main course, and thrust one of his magnificent rebar fingers deep into my nether-passage. I guess he didn’t warn me because then maybe I’d tense up? My sphincter has good snap, after all, and I’d hate to break one of his glorious examples of manly fingerdom. Anyway. He felt around like… hm. Well, let’s say you have a milkshake, and you slurp down all of its deliciousness and then, right at the end, note that the sides of the cup remain slick with milkshake leavings, so you run your finger around the inside of the entire cup, sure not to miss a drop. It was like that. All around the inside, like he was looking for a secret candelabra or hidden bookend that would reveal a previously-concealed passage. Then he said, “Your prostate is super-smooth!”

Lando Calrissian smooth, Doc. It picks up all the ladies.

I then asked him, “While you’re back there, how’s my heart doing?”

And he gave my heart muscles a little massage and said, “Fine, fine, great. Your heart has good snap. But I did find these–” And then he pulled out a set of keys to a 1998 Saturn four-door.

Okay, that last part didn’t happen.

But he did note the super-smoothness of my prostate, and then his iron girder finger fled my most forbidden canal and left me feeling surprisingly hollowed out, as if I was standing suddenly in a room that had no furniture. (Echo, echo, echo.)

Good news was, no prostate cancer. Plus: great, snappy anus.

Which, if my wife ever wises up and leaves me, will be my eHarmony headline.

Anyway, all of this leads me to:

This is really uncomfortable stuff, getting probed like that. Elbows forward, my Ent-like doctor sticking his branches up my no-no-hole. And there’s a part of you that thinks: nope, yeah, no, this is so not worth it, this is weird, I feel weird, I’m pretty sure this is weird.

It’s not weird.

It’s normal.

And, in fact, necessary.

Because what’s worse than getting reamed out down there is, oh, I dunno, goddamn fucking cancer. Cancer — even if it doesn’t kill you! — is a sonofabitch that cares little for your comfort, and though I have not yet had it, I am very well assured (ass-ured?) it is a thousand million blamjillian times worse than the tests you gotta suffer through to detect it.

I come from family who, honestly, is a little wussy about these kinda tests, be they prostate exams, colonoscopies, any manner of testicular juggling. (Wussy and, in some cases, prejudiced. As if a prostate exam would “turn them gay.” First: nothing wrong with being gay. Second: gay and “anal invasion” are non synonymous. Third: gay is not activated via some clandestine switch next to your prostate. “Sorry, Bob, flipped the wrong switch. Broke it, too. You may wanna call your wife.”) I’ve met some women (older ones, usually) who seem somehow prudish about all the vital lady tests, too — they hurt, they’re uncomfortable, they’re weird. Boob mashing and vahooha scraping. And I get that. I dig what you’re burying.

But, really, get it done.

Get this stuff checked out when you need to get stuff checked out. I experienced a little physical discomfort, but I knew the doctor wasn’t back there like, licking his lips and masturbating with his free hand. This isn’t titillating to him. He’s an expert biological plumber, not a sex addict.

(And maybe it’s time to get shut of the notion of TMI anyway. If it really is information, then for the sake of hot fuck you can’t really have enough of it. Too much information? No such thing! I reserve the right to retract this statement after one of you emails me some graphic macro image of the cairn of skin tags adorning your third nipple.)

To reiterate:

Testing.

Get it done.

Get it done.

GET IT CHECKED OUT, FOR CHRISSAKES.

Just, y’know, look at your doctor’s hands first. I’m just saying.

Will Self would have us all believe that the novel is dead.

An interesting assertion, given that in the United States alone we see around 300,000 books published by the so-called traditional system each year — and, reportedly, around 50,000 of those are novels. That fails to include the 300,000 or more books that are author-published each year, a high percentage of which are surely also novels.

Those numbers are, frankly, low estimates.

It is thereby safe to assume that at the barest ittiest-bittiest tiniest-winiest minimum, over 100,000 novels enter our Literary Atmosphere every year. One. Hundred. Thousand.

(We do not see 100,000 films, television shows, or video games released every year, do we?)

Some of the biggest bestsellers of all time have been in the last 20 years.

The digital revolution has only multiplied the ways that people can read books.

But, of course, the novel is dead.

Total corpse. Nail the coffin shut, everyone. The stink must be contained.

Blah blah blah, buggy whips, typewriters, computers that fill entire rooms.

As if the novel is a piece of technology rather than a literary form.

The modern novel has been around for roughly 200 years, but novel-length fiction (ostensibly: a novel) has been around for thousands of years. And it won’t go away. Maybe ever. Because the novel is more than just a container. It’s a programming language. A narrative code to transmit stories, and within those stories lie various truths, ideas, lies about humanity. (And vampires. Lots of vampires. And I see nothing wrong with that because vampires are cool, shut up.)

The novel is not dead.

The novel is eternal.

Its parameters will change. Its market will shift.

Everyone will declare it dead again and again. It’s an old schtick, actually, easily a century-old already, and all the more tiresome for it. Tiresome like when Grandpa angrily squeezes his colostomy bag and cranks on about how JEOPARDY JUST ISN’T THE SAME ANYMORE or WHY AREN’T MOVIES NICE ANYMORE MOVIES USED TO BE NICE.

It’s like everyone forgets all over again.

Of course, what Will Self is really saying, literally and literarily, is that the literary novel, the SERIOUS NOVEL WRITTEN WITH GRAVE SERIOUSNESS THAT MAKES US ALL SERIOUS IN OUR SERIOUS CONTEMPLATION OF ITS SERIOUS BUSINESS is dead, and even that remains a dubious assertion, but just the same, all that means is a particular style of novel isn’t selling as well as you’d like. Just because someone will not publish or buy a half-ass literary novel does not mean that the entire novel form has eaten the twin barrels of an uncultured shotgun.

Of course, Will Self isn’t even saying that. Because he’s still writing and still publishing and he’s able to do that because the novel isn’t growing flowers out of its dead body.

The novel isn’t dead.

The novel will change.

The novel will grow

Our notions about the novel will change and grow.

Other forms will gain prominence and then shrink back.

And the novel keeps on keeping on.

Going forward, anyone who wants to pronounce it dead — find a new schtick, yeah? Let us instead pronounce that pronouncing novels dead is dead. Or, at least, really very unoriginal.

*poop noise*

Last week’s challenge: Fifty Characters.

So, last weekend I was at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference.

It was great stuff — highly recommended.

One of the days I did a workshop on theme, a topic that, for me, is quite beloved. One of the exercises was that we had a bunch of folks in the room come up with various themes — then I picked one and had people write to that theme. Follow me? So, one of the themes they picked was:

“We’re all human, even when we’re not.”

So, I’m going to grab that, and that’s now your theme.

Use it and write a 1000-word piece of flash fiction in service to that theme.

Write it at your online space.

Link back here via the comments.

Due in one week, by May 9th, at noon EST.

The lone gunman Three is gone.

Wren is the new governor of the devastated settlement of Morningside, but there is turmoil in the city. When his life is put in danger, Wren is forced to flee Morningside until he and his retinue can determine who can be trusted.

But out in the Open, they find a border outpost infested with Weir in greater numbers than anyone has ever seen. These lost, dangerous creatures are harboring a terrible secret – one that will have consequences not just for Wren and his comrades, but for the future of what remains of the world.

***

1.  If you MUST do something you love, you might occasionally forget you love it. (But you’ll remember again!)

It wasn’t really a surprise necessarily to discover just how much a deadline could affect my personal level of writing enjoyment, but boy oh boy did I ever get a reminded of it with this sequel.  I’m fortunate to have a day job that involves writing, so I thought I was really used to this whole writing-on-a-deadline thing.  What I neglected to recognize was that for me writing novels had been a special place for me alone where I could play with MY ideas on MY schedule (which of course on the first go-round meant it took me about three years to do six months of work).

With Morningside Fall, knowing I had some very fine folks counting on me to keep up my end of the bargain added a new dimension of pressure that I hadn’t really been expecting.  I let it get to me more than I should have, and there were many, many nights that trudging up to the office to work on The Book was a real struggle.  Sometimes I stared at my laptop bleary-eyed wondering why I ever thought this was a good idea.

The important thing was to keep at it, to keep pecking around the edges and making progress, until I found myself at those scenes and moments in the story that had driven me to start writing the thing in the first place.  My appreciation for certain reveals, or certain character resolutions was heightened, or maybe deepened, or maybe both by the slog through the set up.

2.  Keeping a record of daily productivity is very helpful.

Likely not a revelation to anyone else out there, but this was one of those things I figured I probably should be doing, but just never did.  I’ve never been much of one for lists and spreadsheets and data points and measuring, but a couple of months into writing Morningside Fall, I realized I was counting my productivity more by how many hours I spent in front of the computer rather than by how many words I had on the page.   Imagine my shock when I discovered that just sitting there in my office for three or four hours didn’t necessarily mean I’d made any real progress.

Word count might not be the most accurate thing to use to measure progress, since it’s perfectly possible to write several thousand words that don’t actually move your story forward at all, BUT it’s far better than having nothing at all to go by.  And having that record of daily work gave me some unexpected benefits, too … if I was feeling particularly burned out on a night, I could look back at my recent progress and make an informed decision about whether or not I could afford to give myself a break, or if I needed to buckle down and save the rest day for later.  It also helped me identify my overall velocity at different stages of the book, which is helping me now as I write the third installment of the series.  Knowing that I was crawling along in the early stages and practically flying towards the end is helping me stay more grounded in my expectations for Book Three, which is helping stave off some of that anxiety I suffered during Book Two.

3.  Being honest with yourself is hard, but necessary.

My original deadline for Morningside Fall was July (of 2013), but as I was getting into May I had to take some time to evaluate where I was in the story and how much time I was going to be able to devote to it over those coming months.  (This was another spot where having that Daily Record really came in handy.)  My pride kept reassuring me that WE CAN DO IT, insisting that I could write thousands of words every night between now and then and all of them would be perfect and require no editing whatsoever because hey I’m a professional!  I spent a couple of days wrestling with myself, not wanting to admit that I was in trouble.  But I was in trouble.  And I knew it, no matter how much I wanted to pretend I had it all under control.

I wrote my editor (the excellent Lee Harris of Angry Robot Books fame) a quick email to inform him I hadn’t made the progress that I’d wanted to by that point, and asking if maybe there was any wiggle room on the deadline.  It didn’t take him long to respond, but I of course spent most of that interval imagining the response was going to be somewhere between “No, it’s a hard deadline, get back to work, you hack!” and “No, it’s a hard deadline and we should have known you were a talentless hack, we’ll never work with you again and you still have to give us the book anyway!  On schedule!  Hack!”

Of course Lee’s actual response was something along the lines of “Hey, no problem, how about an extra month?  And thanks for letting us know so early!”

It wasn’t fun to admit I wasn’t hitting my targets, but it was a whole lot better to admit it eight weeks out instead of the weekend before.

4.  Sometimes your characters know themselves better than you do.

I’ve had that thing happen before where characters on the page seemed to take on a life of their own, or started making decisions I wasn’t expecting, but never to the degree that it happened while I was writing Morningside Fall.  At one point, I’d reached an important turning point in the story that I’d known was coming for a long time, and it involved a couple of characters sneaking off without anyone else knowing.  And lo and behold when I got to that moment, literally when the characters were at the door, there was another character sitting there.  My fingers typed it and my brain stopped and said “Wait, no, what?  No.  That’s not how it goes!”  But no matter how much I wanted it to go the way I had planned, once I’d seen it on the page, it just didn’t make sense any other way.  That opened a whole new branch of the story, but in the end, it was much more consistent with what had come before, and added some unexpected depth.

More startling was the character that inserted himself into the book without telling me who he was or why he wanted to be in it.  I wrote several of his chapters before I learned who he really was and what he was about.  And when I realized it I actually said “WHAT?” out loud, which was marginally embarrassing.  It’s pretty rare for me to be able to surprise myself like that.  And maybe a little unsettling.

5.  Being and Doing are different things.

I am Jay Posey.  Sometimes I write books.

If you’ve read the previous points, it probably comes as no surprise that writing Morningside Fall was really tough for me.  There were a variety of contributing factors but one thing I discovered through the process was that I’d let myself put my identity into something that couldn’t sustain it.  I’d bought into the idea that my value as a person was directly tied to my ability to produce.  Since I was A Writer, I was supposed to be Writing, and on the days when I just didn’t have it in me, I let it affect me at a much deeper level than it should have.

I’d developed an unhealthy connection between my output and my self-worth, and at times I got into a death spiral where a bad writing day brought on extra anxiety and fear, which made it harder to write the next day …

Writing is hard work, sure.  A novel is a long work that takes patience, discipline, and sometimes a little grit.  But writing a book should never cause an existential crisis.  Knowing that I need to guard that boundary between who I am and what I do was the most significant of these five things I learned writing Morningside Fall.

***

Jay Posey is a professional typist with a face for radio and a voice for print. He’s the author of the novels THREE and MORNINGSIDE FALL, published by Angry Robot Books, and is a senior narrative designer at Ubisoft/Red Storm Entertainment, where he has spent many years contributing as a writer and game designer to Tom Clancy’s award-winning Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises.  He blogs occasionally at jayposey.com and spends more time than he should hanging around Twitter as @HiJayPosey.

Jay Posey: Blog | Twitter

Morningside Fall: Amazon | B&N | Robot Trading Co