Quarterly Report: 2016 Q1

At the beginning of the year I made several pledges that like all writers involved, essentially reading and writing more. Today, amid all of the requirements of life I will briefly reflect on how the year has gone so far.

On my writing:
The overarching goal for the year was to commit to do something creative every day: whether writing or art, or the maintenance of my meager publishing presence. To accomplish this I decided that at the end of my work day, at the moment when I had fulfilled my contractual hours, I would drop whatever teaching-related activity I was engaged in and concentrate of my writing. This year I have sixth-period prep, which for you non-teachers means that the last period of the day I have no students in class, and I grade and plan and do the countless other things that my teaching career requires from 2:07 to 3:00; my wife, also a teacher, though at a different school across town, leaves to pick me up for the commute home around 3:35, getting to my school somewhere between 3:45 to 4. So from 3 to 3:40 on weekdays I put on some writing music, and put in work. Sometimes, if possible, I will write a bit more when I get home, or if I have some extra time in the morning before students arrive I can get down a few lines, but the afternoons are where the most words get on paper. I shoot for a page a day, figuring my average written page is 250 words. Then Saturdays I type the week's writing, file the manuscript pages, fill out a planner; log to gauge the week's productivity, and do other stuff like submit short stories to lit mags. Sundays I have generally taken off.

That's the plan at least, here is how it went:

January was primarily involved with short works: revising and updating, researching lit mags and making submissions. I worked on 8 short works, writing 3318 words, and made 25 submissions. On my daily log, only 2 of January's 31 days have "Nothing" as an entry. Even though I have a daily average goal of 250 words a day, and the 3318 words weren't even half of 7750 word monthly goal, I still felt like I had made a productive start to the year.

February saw me finishing the last short story revision, and returning to my novels. I have three novels-in-progress, with The Two Loves of Ugly Doug getting most of my attention with 5828 words, followed by Diary of a Sad Man, which I renamed Education, getting 1044; adding 952 words from my last short story addition, and I got a 7824 total, beating my February goal of 7250 words. I made 13 submissions to lit mags. On my daily log, only 2 of February's 29 days have "Nothing" as an entry

March started strong, then tanked when I first got hit by a vicious flu that sapped all mental processes along with my energy (seriously, for about three days my sole desire was to sit on the couch and stare off into space until I could go to sleep-though with it also being 3rd quarter finals that week, I only got to stay home and do that for one day), and then went on a spring break trip with the family. Over the first three weeks of March I got 5421 words into The Two Loves of Ugly Doug and 220 into Education, and then nothing for the last fifteen days of the months, going 5641 words into my 7750 goal. I made 1 short story submission.

Going forward next quarter my writing goal is to get at least 20000 more words into The Two Loves of Ugly Doug. I would be thrilled to finish the first draft of the novel before summer vacation, when my family is planning an epic cross-country road-trip through half of June and July, but that's a long-shot. I'm feeling that the first draft will be between 120000 and 140000 words, and since right now the manuscript is at 94070 I'll have to be well above my quotas to get close. Here's hoping though.
Short work-wise I have nothing new in the pipes, so it's just finding new mags to submit to so that every story is out soliciting at least three mags at a time - with the exception of a couple non-simultaneous submission white whales I'm going after.

On my reading:
I haven't done nearly as much reading as I had hoped I would. As per my Medium personal essay/pledgey thing I am only reading non-white male straight cis authors this year. As usual, the majority of reading came through audiobooks, where I started with Megan Abbot's Fever, and then started reading post-apocalyptic books from female authors, reading Edan Lupeki's California (which I didn't really like), and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, (which I really liked); then on my family's spring break trip when we had over 2000 miles of driving I cheated on my pledge as we listened to Andy Weir's The Martian, (which was entertaining as hell). I also read a bunch of Roxane Gay's essays from Bad Feminist, but I find I can't follow them very well on audio, so I'll have to pick up a physical book sometime to finish. Next up is Octavia Butler's Kindred.

As for physical you-can-hold-them-in-your-hands books I finished Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (took a while to get into, but ended well), and then started on Jeffrey Hannan's Hugo SF (really enjoying so far), the first in a series of books I will read by homosexual writers. Trying to maximize as much writing time as I can, I am sacrificing reading time, but with my kids all in sports now I am getting more reading in at practices, between track heats and baseball/softball innings. The plan is to finish Hugo SF, and get at least 2 other books in before Summer break.

And I think that's all I've got for now. I'll check in again in early summer to let you know how everything has gone in quarter two.

And now I'm wishing I had a cool ending word like Stan Lee's Excelsior!...

Setting Up the Year

I should probably feel better about 2015 than I do. Not that I feel that it was a bad year, just that it went by so fast, and I just have a general feeling of indifference about it. It's like I'm in the middle chapter of a series that's just setting up exposition for exciting plot developments to come, but the foreshadowing is too vague to know where my character is headed.

And there were some great things that happened in 2015 that should make me feel more fondly about it:
- We paid off our student loans and our car loan, so that for the first time in our 17 years of marriage we are completely debt free. And since then, this inexplicable thing has begun to happen where we actually have more money in our savings at the end of the month than when we began.
- Besides our annual daytrips to Santa Cruz we took the kids to Yosemite, Santa Barbara, Lake Tahoe, and Disneyland. Our kids travel very well, so our family trips are a pleasure.
- I started my second year of full-time teaching at my new school, and have finally got all juniors and senior classes, so that everyday teaching isn't a battle against hormone-fueled immaturity like last year's freshman and sophomore classes were. My administration is great, my colleagues are great, and I've got great rapport and buy-in from all of my classes. Planning and grading are a pain as usual, but it's so nice to feel stable, with it almost that next year I will be tenured.
- My eldest son Jacob gave up little league baseball for track, and flourished, competing in the mile, and getting a medal in long-jump at the district meet. His parents definitely enjoy the chill atmosphere of track meets compared to overly competitive parents of little league. Best of all he finished the evil purgatory of middle school and has made a better transition to high school than we could have hoped for. He played on the JV football team, got nearly straight A's, and was Homecoming Duke for the freshman class. My daughter Olivia is midway through middle school, but has avoided all of the bullying and negativity that plagued Jake. The uber-creative one, she is loving her crafts class, and playing trumpet in honor band. Though she had a crap time doing travel softball, she managed to have fun with it, and made it onto her school's team in the fall. Then the youngest, Ben, started 1st grade (though after Pre-K, T-K, and Kindergarten, he's an old hat at school) already having nearly mastered all of the 1st grade standards. He's reading chapter books all on his own, and has started the Harry Potter series.

All great things, right? Things that should be enough.Of course as a writer I hoped to have read more and written more in 2015, which is a mix of guilt that I wasn't more productive and envy of those others who always seem to have the time for it all.

Maybe it's getting older. I'm turning 40 this year, meaning 2015 was the year I began closing down a decade of my life, and it is too easy to think of the things that didn't happen in the past ten years that could have or should have, rather than the good things that did happen.

So it goes. Some reflection is necessary, but there's a point where too much looking back keeps you from moving forward with a purpose. Goodreads tells me that I read 26 books last year, missing my 40 book goal, which didn't keep me from making the same goal again this year. This year I am accepting K. T. Bradford's Challenge, and only reading books not written by white, male, straight, cis authors, with the caveat that I will occasionally cheat. I wrote about it in an essay on Medium.

Writing wise it's the same resolution every year: write more, make sure all finished short stories are under consideration somewhere, be better about connecting on social media, start making art again. This year to keep me accountable I started a log, so that I can ensure that I have done at least one thing for my creative life every day. After I get these last few short stories revised and submitted I hope this will be the oft advised "Write at least one page a day".

Since 2016 for me is split with finishing my 30's and beginning my 40's, it's a strange hybrid of short-term and long-term goals. I think now I will just focus on the next five months before my birthday. Here is my best case scenario (for why envision anything else):
- I will have completed all of my unfinished and unrevised short stories and have them off soliciting acceptance.
- my reading book count for the year will be in the teens.
- I will have begun one of the art project I've been planning for (gulp) years.
- I will be well on my way to completing one of my novels-in-progress (right now I'm leaning towards my Great American Zombie Novel The Two Loves of Ugly Doug).
- and since we are discussing best case scenarios, some of the short stories I have out will have been accepted, and there will be a sudden surge in readership, bringing enough revenue in to start a micro-press, which will begin it's run by finally allowing me to hold printed copies of my first two books in my hands.

Good luck to me, and good luck to you this year!

Amusing myself while filling my writing pen after its annual thorough cleaning, with some pondering on the potentially superstitious nature of a writer's chosen instrument.

 There have been times when I ran out of ink, and I wasn't able to refill my pen, and wanted to continue writing,

 where I have forced myself to use another pen, despite queasy feelings of its unnaturalness and betrayal;

 but I admit that I would do that writing on scrap paper,

 and then properly transcribe it into the manuscript with my true writing instrument as soon as I could.

Is this akin to the athlete who won't play without his lucky socks? Do surgeons insist on using one particular scalpel? A painter's one precious brush? Or is this a special kind of screwy reserved for writers?

An Update on Updates

It took me a while to come around to the idea of updating published works. When I gave up the idea of having my books traditionally published, I had no idea that there was anything more to Ebook self-publishing than 1. write a book; 2. make a cover; 3. publish! With the exception of Stephen King's The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, publishing meant finality: like it or no, the words were set, and weren't going to ever change.

But then after becoming part of the self-publishing community, particularly through Smashwords, and following founder Mark Coker's blogs, posts, and guides, I found that clicking the little publish button didn't have to be the end of any story. So when I started getting feedback from readers I respected on my novel, I found that there were things I should change, and things I wanted to change.

As a part of the self-publishing community, I found an editor who volunteered her proofreading skills to find the unintentional grammatical & mechanical errors (& more), and solicited feedback from willing readers - something I probably should have done before publishing I know, but didn't know how to before becoming part of the Goodreads community, and discovering "beta-reading."

The outcome of that proofreading, and beta-reading, is the 2013 edition of my novel Alexander Murphy's Home for Wayward Celebrities, which features a draft significantly more free of unintentional grammatical/mechanical/spelling errors (some were intentional), a revised chapter system, and over 17,000 words of new content - including a new character, and an new ending. I even threw some color on the cover.

I was happy returning to the world of the novel, finding that there was more going on there than I had first imagined. So then, is it finished? All I can say is that it is finished for now, but if there is something I find later that belongs in the book, Ebook self-publishing means that my story will remain an open world that I can return to to play in.


My second update was to my story collection, My Governor's House & other stories. Now, though I have embraced self-publishing for my books, I still like having my short stories traditionally published through literary magazines before I compile them into my own collection, and some of the stories I want to include in My Governor's House are still looking for that lit zine first home. After they are published in zines, and the rights have reverted back to me, they'll get added to this collection, or the next collection. EBook self-publishing gave me the opportunity to publish a small collection of my previously published stories, and watch it grow to full as my orphan stories get placed. So this update was to include the story "The D. C. S. G. Meeting," which had been published last year in the fall 2012 issue of Menacing Hedge; audiobook fans can also find a reading of the story by the author there as well.

New readers will get the updated editions automatically; previous readers can update their files at any time to get the new edition - there is no extra charge for this: once you've bought the book, you have access to every future incarnation of the book.

Happy reading!

A Third-Life Third-Major Crisis

Let me give you this warning: never read Nick Hornby if you're feeling unsettled in life and aren't ready to admit to yourself that you are probably providing the majority of your unsettledness yourself. The unflinching way he presents the attitudes and actions of himself and his characters dares the literate adult quasi-mature man to survey himself for any similar characteristics: to remove the apparatus that hides our flaws from ourselves and address them, even if we can't figure out how to deal with them.

I have been listening to the audiobook presentation of Hornby's "Fever Pitch" on the 45-75 minute (depending on traffic) drive to and from my teacher credentialing program, so I get the dual-fisted grappling of my adjusting to a new schedule (not working late nights anymore), a new school and field of study (education), and entrance into my thirties (I've almost given up on today's radio music), with the constant succession of rejection letters (from agents and journals) ambushing my mailbox, while I listen to Nick describe the progression of aimlessness with his major field post-graduation (sounds too familiar), working a job that lasts an inexplicably long set of years (wincingly familiar), eventually entering a teaching program (ditto), then giving up teaching to write (not a luxury I suspect I will be allowed me), which begins and progresses as unsuccessfully as mine has, all around and about the age I find myself in (oh yeah, and he writes a little bit about soccer there too, which with the problems in his love life are the only things I completely don't relate to). Nick begins as a playwright, and like many other authors whom I admire his first works are rejected and then abandoned, much like I've been recently, fearfully, considering may be the case with my first novel. I then wonder if these parallels I see between his life then and my life now are, actually, valid, or am I just too unsettled for a proper self-reflection?

But then I have these flashing moments of blindered clarity: I realize that Nick is cataloguing his writing's rejection in a successfully published book, and I remind myself that nobody has read more than half of my novel, so the rejection of my first novel isn't quite definitive yet.

And then, even the failure to have my first novel accepted by an agent or publisher puts me in quite a fraternity:

-Franz Kafka never even finished his three novels, much less had them published in his lifetime.

-Daniel Handler's novel "The Basic Eight", was rejected thirty-seven times before finding a publisher (also, it wasn't his first completed novel).

-Stephen King wrote several novels before having "Carrie" published, and at one time had so abandoned that manuscript that he physically threw it in the trash.

There's more, but that's all I have the energy to present now. But I'd love to hear any such stories you readers would like to send me.

VID-agra for my libid-EO

There was a time where I couldn't get enough films to watch. I'd watch two, three times a day. The Alameda County Library has always been for me the poor man's Netflix, and I'd have them pimping out as many vids as I could carry home. I was open for anything: independant, foreign, Hollywood, classic, in all genres; I'd find a director to frequent and wear them out, then move on to another, and another. I'd watch two movies during the day, and then watch another with my wife that night. I was insatiable.

But I have found that one of the byproducts of where I am as a writer now is a cooling of my viewing lust. Now at the most I'll watch a piece of a film that I own - that I've already watched several times - when I'm eating lunch or folding laundry, so that maybe I'll get through a movie a week; most times I just reshelve it after fifteen minutes. Films by my favorite directors - films that I've had a request in on for months - get returned unwatched, and too frequently late and with a fine!

I'd like to attribute this to settling down, to the refinement of maturity. But I suspect it has more to do with an unhealthy obsession with my writing. Whenever the desire to watch a movie pops up, there is an unwanted word-count calculation of what I could accomplish during that two hours, or amount of revision time that would be lost, or research time on markets to submit my short stories or agents to query for my novel or publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts or inspirational reading that might catalzye a new short story or novel chapter or revisional path. The onanistic nature of my current writing regime has sapped my passion for film as a valid source of stories - of an equivalently influential medium to impel my narratives - and, most of all, a satisfying source of entertainment.

So, how does one temper an addiction to their own creativity?