Category Archives: writing

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Puttering around in the garden

I saw a picture on twitter yesterday that got me thinking. Not thinking in any sort of productive way, but that way that writers start thinking, as in: There’s a story here and I’m going to find it. So, here is the story. It’s not well edited or polished, but here it is. 

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To say Samantha loved her garden would paint a dramatically understated picture of bright days filled with every shade of green complimented by brilliant flowers in every color of the rainbow. She luxuriated in the smell of damp earth and gentle buzzing of a thousand types of insects. It was her one sanctuary from the hectic bustle of domestic demands, and a job that would make even Einstein’s brain hurt.
On a day as perfect as any she could recall, she went back into her garden, eyeing a big, horribly bland patch of grass. That patch of grass had been on her landscaping shit list for entirely too long. Sure, lawn was nice, but it was boring. She wanted more color, more vegetables, more greens, and most importantly, less grass to mow. She took out her shovel, she took out her hoe, she took out her gloves, and she faced the grass. 

Armed with the tools to convert a perfectly good lawn into a far better garden, she set to it. First, she removed the sod, then began turning black dirty digging ever deeper. With each shovel, she got the satisfying shuck of the shovel sinking into the earth. Then, a resounding clang rattled the shovel handle. 

Samantha frowned. Rocks of any notable size weren’t common in this area. The topsoil should go for many feet, not just a few inches. It certainly did in the rest of her garden. She tapped the bit of rock with her shovel and found it was, indeed, a substantial obstacle. It was deep enough that she could have left it, but leaving it would bother her. She got down on her hands and knees and set to finding the edges of the rock so she could move it.

A few minutes with her hands in the dirt and she uncovered not a rock, but a perfectly round metal object some sixteen inches in diameter. She continued to remove the dirt until she revealed an old rusted car wheel rim. It was absolutely embedded in the ground and wouldn’t so much as wiggle. More digging revealed the entire rim. It sat neatly in the hole as if she might just be able to pick it up and move it, yet it still wouldn’t budge. She pulled it, she kicked it, she even jammed the shovel under it and tried to pry, but nothing seems to help. It was almost as if it were still attached to the car. The thought made her feel cold, as if a great curtian of rain clouds had rolled over the perfect blue sky and quenched the sun.

In an attempt to reassure herself that this silly bit of debris was not still attached to a vehicle, she cleared yet more dirt from further around the rim. It took little time before she struck something else. This time, she hit what proved to be a fender. She nearly stopped and covered the whole mess, but curiosity pressed her on. Who would bury and entire car? 

As the morning wore on to afternoon and threatened to become evening, Samantha revealed more and more of the car, finally coming to the driver’s side door window. She tapped it with her shovel once, then twice, and on the third tap it shattered. It was so sudden and unexpected that she let out a little scream. Then she looked around to make sure nobody had noticed. They hadn’t, she was quite alone. The kids were with dad at soccer practice. 

Curiosity continued to push her, so she took her shovel and pushed it in through the broken window. She tentatively poked the interior of the car. The shovel stopped. Something pulled on it. She pulled back, but the shovel wouldn’t come free, then it shot clean out of her hands. She stared, absolutely dumbfounded and more than a little frozen by fear, staring at the broken window where her shovel had disappeared. 

A skeletal hand reached out of the window. Samantha screamed and turned to run, but something grabbed her leg. She screamed all the harder as she fell to the ground and something pulled her inexorably toward the broken car window. No matter how hard she grabbed at the grass and thrashed about, she kept moving until she reached the very edge of the car window. Then, she felt more bony fingers grasp her legs, pulling her yet hard, and in one very hard, swift yank, she was in darkness.

When her husband and children returned from soccer practice, they found a shovel, and a hoe, and a pair of gloves laying next to a small hole where an old car rim sat partially covered in dirt.

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Dear writers, why do we write? – My reason

This question came at me out of the blue this evening after a particularly long day that started with a 2 1/2 hour commute to the body shop and rental car agency before work (almost triple the usual with an odd detour). The off the cuff response to ‘WHY?!’ is: because maybe writing is a sort of really cheap drug that doesn’t actually get you high. I mean, I could quit if I wanted to, right?

Probably not – and that’s the crux of dependency, isn’t it?

Everyone who knows me, knows that I started programming back in high school and went to college for the same. What fewer folk know is that I started out with little games and I wanted to turn that into programming games for a living. It turns out, I’m not really smart enough for that sort of thing and don’t have the temperament to live in the sort of city where that’s a possible job option and I certainly haven’t got the steady hand nor sharp eye you have with most artists. My creative world lives in making things where I can measure twice and cut once. it’s one of the reasons I like wood-working. There’s a precision your tools give you that a paint-brush, for example, won’t. In any case, my education and various career options led me to where I am today. Not game programming.

I don’t want to sound as though I don’t enjoy my job. In fact, I think that after having left a year and returned, I feel much more fortunate and committed than ever before. You sometimes get lucky and it’s not always obvious when you do.

So, here I am today, a writer who’s chief success is publication in a small-town newspaper as the author of a sometimes entertaining recipe box. My lesser known successes are more of the personal variety and simply involve having actually drafted more than one novel (I’m up to 3 and have two more well on their way to full draft status). On more than one occasion, I’ve attempted to just give it up completely and walk away, because well crap, I’m not very good at this and in spite of tremendous support and help from the writing community haven’t managed to achieve the fundamental author task of just getting something published.

Repeated failure is demoralizing, and incredibly painful to the ego yet, I keep doing it, and I’m not alone. So many of us are in the same boat, constantly chipping away at a story that we desperately want to share and not quite getting there. Or better, finding that one lucky break that puts us in the enviable position of getting to write for a living! Oh my. Wouldn’t that be something.

To circle back around the the metaphor with the drug & dependency. I can’t speak for my colleagues out there, but for me, I cling to the tangible creative outlet that writing provides. It’s a way to express myself and create things that didn’t exist before. When I was a kid, I was absolutely intoxicated by the writings of those who created new worlds for me to explore and be a part of, and ever since, I’ve remained drunk on the idea and am continually looking for a bigger fix, and in comes writing, the only drug that might get me that next big high with the occasional collapsed ego hang-over.

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Can a brick wall kill an author?

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This week I hit a brick wall. I’m not going to call it writer’s block. I suppose that label is just fine, but I hate it because it suggests a block in creativity. That’s not what I’m experiencing, exactly. I wrote and re-wrote a particular section of my WIP about six times this week and got no closer to improving it. On the contrary, I found that the work was actually getting WORSE! The characters started to lose their voice, the plot increasingly twisted toward a series of wrong turns in a forest. The result is a book hard in the ditch (if you happen to be reading this and don’t live in a place that can get 36″ of snow, I’m basically thinking of a car up to it’s windows in snow on the side of the highway). I sat back and evaluated the plot plan and came to the conclusion that while I have a few fun scenes and a few silly characters and even a few very undeveloped themes orbiting around a notion that, in theory, could be whipped into a book. Upon careful examination, I’m not at all convinced my original plan, or even any adjustment of it, is actually going to work.

This wouldn’t be nearly so bad, except that this is my THIRD manuscript for the year, which sounds fairly manic, but it’s 30K, 65K, and 45K each before stopping to assess. The first was ditched because it was a floundering sequel to a book that failed to launch, the second started strong and went side-ways for exactly the same problems I had to kill the Dark Queen. I thought, tonight, before sitting down to write this, that perhaps I’d go one more time through Wine Bottles and Broomsticks and see about shopping it around to a few more folks who might be interested in taking the project on. I started with the main character. He’s not as strong as Betas would like him to be and so I though that’d be a great place to start. Well, I stared at a blank screen for fifteen minutes before realizing that repair just isn’t going to happen. Rick’s a loser, and it’s beyond my skill to fix him. He needs to have a purpose, which he doesn’t. That was the plan originally, but it makes for a story nobody really wants (keep in mind here that I have had a tremendous cheering section and I think about that EVERY DAY). Needless to say, giving him a purpose and re-writing the book around it would not only be a tremendous amount of work, I’m not sure I’m able to pull it off.

So why is this a brick wall? It’s a brick wall because I’ve got half a dozen projects in the air and don’t posses the skills necessary to take these manuscripts apart and put them back together again in the form of a coherent, compelling, and (most importantly) professional work. Anyhow, the whole thing has absolutely killed my confidence and my creativity. I can’t see myself writing out of this hole and every time I look at another book, I feel that I could totally do that, but the reality is I can’t. It’s sort of like being the guy watching some sports thingy on TV and knowing I could do it better, but also knowing full well that the minute I hit the field, I’d die.

Really, this blow to the old ego is hard enough that I very nearly deleted everything I have and deleted almost all of my author platform to walk away clean. I haven’t done that yet, but I’m on the very edge of doing just that. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy on all of it and see myself simply failing. It’s not a good feeling, but that’s where I am. In any case, it may be that I won’t post for quite some time. However, I will still be active on my other blog (bakedgoodsandbourbon.com), because I still cook and even if my family hates me for it, the mostly eat it.

 

Photo credit: Curtis Gregory Perry Brick Wall via photopin (license)