So I’m working from a Word template because that’s the program on this machine. We’ll also have a InDesign ‘blank’ I think we’re disributing when we get it finalized, so I guess I’ll be working in that when we have it. But basically here’s what it looks like:

(You know the deal, click to embiggen.)

There are actually only certain sections that I need to worry about. Sections like the Rules and the basic intro are all going to be the same from guestbook sheet to sheet. So too the place for signatures will be handled by the layout so that leaves me with the following to do.

• The Character Story
• The Character Descripton
• Conflicts
• Words
• and of course Story Seeds

I will also have to give consideration for the special hand sign, but that’s still in development, so I can’t give you the inside on that yet.

YET.

So there’s no right way or place to start, but I find the Story Seeds to be the toughest part so I tend to do them last when I’ve figured out everything else first.

Character Story

So this section is what people will first read about the character, in theory, and gives them an idea of why the character is fun. Fun being the operitive word. It should be a little twisted, a little funny, or if you’re doing a more dramatic character really compelling.

Easy, sure, so long as your remember this has got to be in around 100 words. Or, if you prefer, two short paragraphs. So in one hundred words, give or take, you need to:

• Give a feeling for who the character is.
• How they’re in the situation they’re in.
• Potential roleplaying hints, or suggestion of how they might behave.
• A hook to lead them into their seeds.

If you break it down to about one sentence to a paint above, you’ll probably be fine.  If you can have each sentence hit on two points, you’re double plus good. Does this seem a little obsessive compulsive? Yeah, it probably is, but that’s me, counting projects down to 100 word blocks if I have to.  More importantly, a Guestbook character is a lot like Gaming Haiku. All my favorite forms of poetry are very structured forms, so I’m bringing that to this project. YMMV.

So the character I’m doing right now is the Bonus Character we’ll be distributing at Gen Con Indy this year. (Yay! Woo!) In this case she’s a super awesome badass Space Marine. She’ll be a lose tie-in with our game Machine Zeit, you know, marketing and all that. Anyway, that gives me the following information for the sheet.

A hired gun with skills, experience in dangerous environments, she’s being paid good money to be set up to a derelict space station and scope the place out.

That’s 28 words, not bad. But I feel like I can pack more information into this opening line. I’m going to take out the mention of ‘money’ and replace it with ‘credits’ and adjusting the value attached to something more geeky. That propels the character into a more clear sci fi setting with a different system of income than our own. Also, ‘scope the place out’ is very weak. It says nothing about the character, the setting, or her purpose on the station, and so it’s got to go. After thinking about it a while, (and staring at the word ‘derelict’ while trying to figure out why I can never spell it right…) I decide ‘in search of profit and something far more personal. Something his employers don’t know he’s after.’  With a little more fidgeting, that changes out intro into:

A hired gun with skills, experience in an array of battlespaces and covert opts, she’s gotten a frak-ton of credits in search of ‘sensitive company property.’ That’s not the prize she’s got an eye on, however, she’s looking for something far more personal, and something her employers don’t know she’s after.

That’s about 50 words, and it might be a little obsessive, but I feel like almost every word suggests something about setting, character, mood, or motivation. “Sensitive company property’ and how she’s hiding things from her employers gives a feeling of paranoia and EBUL CORPORATIONS that’s vital to this subgenre as well as our game specifically without harping in too much detail about it. (Battlespace is real term. I found it on the DOD Military terms site. I love research!) Even the word ‘array’ feels better to me than ‘variety’ or other synonym because array has a sci fi military feel to it. Every double meaning you can cram into the character is a good one.

So with that, I feel like why She’s there, who sent her, what she’s after and who she is nicely covered. (There’s a little space between the cold hard mercenary and her search for ‘something personal’ so the player of the sheet can take it in either direction. Roleplaying suggestion, not demand, after all.) Now I just want to give a little more punch to the ‘setting’ and the hook for the story seeds to come and I’ve got a whole 50 words to do it! So I hit up the station itself, again, a tie in to our other game, but it needs to stand on it’s own. In this case, I’ll borrow a bit from our cover copy because these are words that have already been labored over and it saves me some work.

She’s heard the ghost stories about the stations and ignored them. She was wrong. The ghosts are real. Whatever they are, they’re hungry and they don’t like intruders. Whatever else she may be, the Space Marine is an intruder.

That satisfies me on the points I want to cover and gives me plenty of angles for my story seeds to come. That clocks the character story in at about 90 words. (I tend somewhere around 88 words. I don’t know why.) It gives me room for a sentence in case David takes a look and decides I’m missing something. But again, YMMV.

Character Description

This is actually just notes you’d give to an artist to describe what you want the piece. I’d give rough age, possibly body type, important details, what have you. In this specific case, we handed the art over to our cover artist George Cotronis. With him, because we know him as an artist we just gave him the layout requirements, that it’s a female space marine, and step back to wait for the magic to happen. If I were working with a new artist, I might get more specific and I might mention our Artist Guidelines. If you have some Creative Commons clip art you’re tossing in there, or you’re going to draw your own stick figure, you can skip this step.

Words

I actually like to do the Words to Use next, because this is simple and gets me juiced about the character. This is a mix of five verb and five Nouns. (Though, admittedly, I cheat sometimes and use adjectives here and there.) Usually, this process involves putting music on too loud and dancing around in front of my white board until the words spring to mind. Sometimes, like with this character, I can borrow from their profession to help with words. In this case, I’m going to hit up words from the DoD site I mentioned above and maybe some words from the Halo playing community. (If I can stand it.) Or maybe movie and TV related, Battlestar Galactica comes to mind and some words that suggest body horror to go along with the ghosts in the setting. After a little research, I come up with these words.

Nouns: Sticky, Intangible, EMP Intrusion, Trap,  Radiation.

Verbs: Frag, Strafe, Agonize, Decay, Freeze.

Again, there’s some double meanings here. (Frag could have been a noun, but I think it says more if it’s a verb.) A lot of your micro setting can be drawn out of these words and some of it took some tightening. For example, at first I used EMP Emitter because that sounded like a cool toy. While cruising the DoD site, though, I saw they had the term “EMP Intrusion” which says so much more with less. Now I could have a device that could do such a thing, or maybe monsters or station environment or whatever you want to do with it when you’re running the sheet.

The other fun thing about the Word to Use is that they’re not for you as a player. When you’re being the Space Marine, you can totally ignore this section if you want. It doesn’t come into play until your running the story for your partner. You have a bunch of words that imply things about your character and your setting, but challenge you as a GM because you have to jam them into the story of a character who has nothing to do with them.

Complications

There’s only three of these babies, and again, we’re going to be using the themes and setting tropes and so on from the character sheet even though they don’t get used by the player during his character turn. I like to draw on cliches or things that would regularly be a problem for a character like this. Why? Well, let me show you. Let’s say, these are your conflicts:

1. All Out of Ammo: During your story, being completely out of ammo is going to be a big problem.
2. Fracking Piece of Junk!: Some big important piece of technology will fail during your story and hinder you big time.
3. This Sucks: In your story, a vacuum will threaten your life.

This is all stuff that ties into a Space Marine in a Sci Fi horror pretty well, clearly, but it isn’t for her. These are complications her player throws at the other player. So, if the other player’s sheet is, say, a teenage super hero trying to pass a midterm without getting caught using her powers, that suggestion of a vacuum may not mean the vacuum of space, it may mean a vacuum cleaner that’s gone wrong somehow. Likewise, say the other player has a fantasy elf princess, they’re going to have great fun trying to figure out what ‘technology’ means within their story for the sake of the second conflict. This is really what this game is all about, twisting your head sideways and telling a short quick story while standing on your head.

And, so far as word count and all, lean on the short. Imply instead of say. I don’t say ‘vacuum can be space or a cleaner.’ I leave that to the players to decide. Ambiguity is a good thing when used on purpose, it’s especially useful in poetry, for example, and as I said, this is much more like poetry than it is like prose.

Story Seeds

For me, for whatever reason, this is THE hardest part of a Guestbook character. Partially because we’ve created some really crazy restraints and partially because I know these seeds are going to be what really inspires stories and I’m LOATHED to have them suck. Basically, these are ten (or nine, we’re working on the layout on that,) three sentence story starters that bloom into the adventure your character is going to go through. So, you look at your list on the character, pick a story seed you haven’t done yet, and tell the other player, your GM, what adventure you’re going to tell with her help. Clearly, every time you sit down to play this game it’s going to be different because the conflicts and so on come from a different sheet and person, but with several seeds to choose from, you have even more variety to play the same sheet over and over again.

How are seeds constructed? Well, first I decide if there’s a theme I’m using, or if I’m just drawing from the character. For example, with The Taco Girl, I wanted most of seeds to be ‘about’ her wanting to help her community and her family. This helped me narrow down what sorts of stories would come out of her hook.

For the sake of our Space Marine, I think that each of the seeds is going to draw from either what she’s personally looking for vs what the Company wants her to look for.

Beyond that, the format is very specific. One sentence to set up the story. One sentence to introduce the main conflict or problem the character will face, and one sentence to tell both player and GM what they character must to to resolve the story successfully. That’s it. That’s all the time you have for your seed. But no pressure, because you’ve already got in your head plenty of methods to help with this micro writing. Here’s my process.

1. Once on the station, you’re free to start looking for your daughter, held in cryostasis from before the crisis that shut the station down. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one looking for your daughter, as a bounty hunter appears on the station and now you’re racing to get to her first. Figure out why this bounty hunter wants your daughter and protect her from him before he can escape with her.

I feel like that’s a fun little seed with plenty of little mysteries to explore, but I think it can be tightened up. A lot actually. For example, we know the Space Marine STARTS on the station, so there’s no need to say ‘once on’ and so on. No need for bridges between the story hook at the end of your character story and your story seed. Start these little monster ‘in media res’ as the smart guys say. (In the middle of the action, if you can’t be bothered to google it and don’t know it already.) Additionally, some of the language can be tightened up and a lot of excess language can be dropped. Honenstly, I wouldn’t try to write the sentences perfectly tight the first time through. You’ll waste a lot of time thinking about doing instead of doing. With writing, especially mircowriting like this, it’s easier to perfect something that exists than it is to create something perfect out of nothing. Write your whole seed first, than go in and trim and adjust. With that in mind, here’s what I cut the seed down to.

1. Your daughter is being held in cryostasis on the station and you’ve got to find her. A cut-throat bounty hunter is on the station with you, he also wants to find your daughter, and it can’t be for any good reason. Get to her before he does or risk losing her forever.

Now, I’ve left some stuff out to make the story more flexible. Finding out why the guy wants her isn’t as important, but mostly that’s because I feel like the player will tend to include that anyway in order for the narrative to make sense as she’s creating it. In this case, I don’t mention ghosts, the evil corps that sent her up or anything like that. The player will again, potentially drawn in from that flavor, or they might not depending on the sort of descriptive words and complications they’re throwing into the mix. I don’t think it’s necessary for each story seed to hit on all points on the character. Quite the contrary, using some and not others gives you more variance out of one sheet and increases the chances for replay which is vital to this game. Three seeds based on the same idea with different parts of the sheets ‘setting’ can help you fill a sheet up pretty fast.

Here are some of the other seeds I’m going to throw on this character.

2. There’s a black box on the station you’re supposed to collect. Not only does it contain the reports of how your husband died up here, but the ghosts of all the other victims up here are trying to protect it from falling into corporate hands. Destroy the ghosts or prove to them that if you get the box, you’ll make sure their deaths are exposed for what they were; murder.

3. Your daughter is being held in cryostasis on the station and you’ve got to find her. Only, your dead husband is up there and he can’t see the difference between friend and foe anymore. Convince him that you are there to help so you can get past the protective spirit before the life support fails and your daughter dies.

4. You know what’s in the hardcopy you’ve been sent up to retrieve, and you know what it’s worth. Due to structural failing, the hardcopy has probably fallen into the lowest section of the ship, through a few ‘circles’ of ghostly-hell. Descend through several floors of ghost infested horrors to find the hardcopy without joining their ranks.

5. They told you it was just some equipment, but as soon as you see it, you know it’s a weapon. So you’ve got a huge radiation-producing megaweapon, but getting out a live with it is going to be hand since it seems to attract the ghosts on the station. Make good your daring escape with the weapon as the ghosts, monsters, and station itself try to stop you.

6. While collecting your bounty, you realize there are still about ten people alive on the station in need of help. They know how to avoid the monsters better than you do, but they don’t know how to survive the mercenaries sent up to ‘erase’ the ‘loose ends.’ Get the survivors out while they help you dodge the ghosts and you help hold off the mercs.

7. The station is supposed to have been ‘dead’ for about six months when you go up. And yet, as you are searching the wreckage for your bounty, your reality keeps getting overlapped by visions of that final fateful day. Don’t lose yourself to the horrific flashbacks of death or get dragged into it by the ghosts who can’t let go.

8. If there’s anything you hate more than bounty hunters, it’s pirates. The station is crawling with a team of pirates up here to steal company property. Fight off the pirates and prevent them from getting to anything too useful without them fragging you and adding your ghost to the community up there already.

9. You’ve been sent up with an engineer who is as brilliant as he is daring. What he isn’t, is prepared for the physical danger of a malfunctioning station full of hungry dead. Keep the man alive while he risks his neck to study what destroyed the station.

Some of these seeds will have identical set ups, they’ll share details, but because of little additions of setting or pieces of background left out, there’s a lot of room to play. Other things to keep in mind while you’re creating your seeds.

• The seeds do not need to be related. They’re only ‘cannon’ in the story they’re used, so even if the seeds contradict each other completely, no worries. (As in the case of number 1 and 3.)
• Cheat if you have to. There are times even the greatest poets broke form, and there’s really no problem with that. If it was good enough for The Bard and Dylan Thomas,  it’s good enough for me. (Just try not to do it too much, that’s half of the fun of the creation.)
• You don’t need to use the conflicts or the words in your seeds. Remember, they’re for the other character’s stories. They should fit themes and tropes and so on, but they don’t have anything to do with what happens to this character.
• Be exacting. Ambiguity in idea is good, in word choice it isn’t. Use exactly the word you mean, and use every word you can to fill in colour and concept. Spare nothing. Abuse your thesuraus. No risk of being flowery here, the work is too brief. (Micro writing fascinates me, but that’s another post.)
• Leave room for interpretation whenever possible, but especially in your ‘solution’ sentence. Don’t tell them ‘kill the monster, get the gold.’ Tell them ‘get around the monster, get whatever he’s hiding.’ Solutions that do not require violence are very good solutions indeed. There are plenty of games focused on slaying the monster. This is a game about solving the problem instead.

So, if you happen to still be reading at this point, thank you so much for sticking around, and I really hope you try your hand at this yourself. I look forward to hearing what you do with these sheets in play, in hacking, and in creation.

In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. John 1:1*

If you sort of ignore the actual intention of the quote and take it literally, man, that’s a sexy egotistical concept for even the most humble wordsmith.

I’ll say it, I’m a devotee of the Word.**

I have hymnals floating all over my house. Bird by Bird is sitting in my bathroom right now. Two copies of On Writing float around the house, though both are right now in my dining room. I have books on structure and genre piled up next to my bed and there are more then a few editing books in my living room. I go to these books when I want to revel in my faith, but I also go to them when I find I have a crisis of faith. Picking up a good one, flipping through for inspiration, generally fills me with fervor and suddenly I want to get back to practicing my faith.

I’m not clergy, though, I spread the faith casually, I have neither the vision nor the dedication to teach The Word to others. I have to live with it, practice my religion in the real world outside of the safety of many churches devoted to The Word. I envy clergy their solitude to contemplate The Word, but I guess if none of us were laity, there wouldn’t be much of a faith to discuss. I honor the men and women who devote their time to the Word as an idea and something to study, but I’m not smart enough to do much more with it then live it.

But this isn’t some hippy religion with guitars and a lot of forgiveness. As far as I know, confession exists, but it’s generally something you can only do if you aren’t successful and even there, there isn’t really anyone to absolve you.

To add it it’s cult-like mystique, it’s usually something no one practices in public. You can’t go to an open service on Sunday or see us spreading the Word in a public park on at an airport. Sure, you’ll see the rare anarchist sitting in a coffee shop with their alter pieces; laptop and moleskin notebook and hymnal. Sometimes they’re actually practicing, but more often then not it’s just set dressing to control how people judge them. “Oh, they must be Wordists, you can tell by the props they carry. They must be really faithful. Look at all their stuff.”

I admit, I am sometime guilty of putting the alter pieces before the worship and get so lost in the rituals, (I must have silence or the right music or the right candles,) that I neglect the Word. Here, I’m confessing.

Anyway… We don’t often do it in public. We tend to have to do it in dark places, under rocks and in closets and away from eyes that judge. It often alienates us from people who don’t understand the Word the way we do. Hell, it tends to isolate us from each other. Almost like and anticult. We have to form elaborate excuses to gather in hotels or convention centers or coffee shops or online on forums just so we feel a little bit less alone, and yet service to the Word is still done so inside the self that it has to be done in private.

And of course, no one worships the Word right so far as anyone is concerned. When my worship is done, the first thing I want is to find other worshipers to tell me what I did wrong. Like the  gathers, we construct elaborate ritual around critiquing the way others celebrate the Word and what they did wrong and right. Sometimes we gather around the works of Worshipers long dead to decide if their work is still relevant or how it’s so much better then anything out today.

Plus there’s the blood sacrifice.

No, really. Sometimes you’ll be in worship, have say, 10,000 words down of a 60,000 word novel when the Word speaks to you and you realize that about, say, 5,000 of those words don’t actually fit in this novel and without them another 3,000 don’t work so I’m pretty much going to have to start over.

So, I’m cutting and hacking and bleeding all over and the Word is appeased. Hemorrhaging word count on the alter is sometimes the only way to reconnect with the Word, and that’s why so few people really stick with the church for long. I don’t have a problem with those who lapse, they’re probably smarter then me, less brainwashed by their faith. I almost envy them too.

I’ve probably stretched the metaphor, but since my form of confession is a one way street anyway, I’ll just have to live with that.

*You know who’s fantastic? Cherie Priest. You know why? Apparently, she has that phrase it Greek tattooed on her lower back. I love her so very much!

**Not to be confused with any actual religious figures, spirits or ideas. The faith represented here is purely fictitious. Probably. Unless you want to give me money.

• I guess the big one is I had another baby. That’s two. We have replaced ourselves with smaller, more beautiful and probably more intelligent hybrids of our combined DNA. I’m already a more recovered and happier mom than I was, but a lot of that is because I didn’t have major sugry with this birth and I’m no longer a first time mom. (Duh.) I’ll call that a win.
• Tina gets smarter and more beautiful everyday. We’re talking about getting her a desk top next year because she’s already so computer literate. Every time she shows me a craft she’s done or a picture she’s drawn on the computer I tell her, ‘just beautiful.’ Every time I say it, I’m really saying it to her.
• I’m still getting paid to write, and now I’m starting to eek out a qualified career making enough money to get by.
• I think I’ve sold about another 15o,000 words this year, writing about 170 to 180,000 in total. Next year I’ll have a better count. (HA!)
• I’ve spoken at at three Cons this year and helped David land similar apperances, which boosts both of our careers and rocks pretty hardcore.
• I’ve actually seen physical copies of books I’ve worked on, three of which are on my shelf as we speak.
• I wrote for and got accepted in my first anthology. Buried Tales of Pinebox, TX is awesome and you should buy a copy if you haven’t already.
• I’ve been published on The Escapist and now have a regular blogging job at Altern8.com.

Looking over last year, there’s a few things I didn’t get to I wanted to this year, but I’m not too down about it.

• I didn’t hit 250k this year, but I did have a baby so I’m just going to have to live with that.
• I didn’t write and produce any radio drama. I just… forgot about it. What a damn shame. Maybe this year, assuming they go to a 36 hour day all of the sudden.
• I did not get Unhero out, but I’ve come to terms with the rewrites I’ll need to do first so that’ll just have to happen over time instead.

Plans for this year?

• I hope I can get more personal writing done, fiction and the like. I have a few creative writing classes this Spring so I don’t have much choice on that, but after the classes and in terms of novel writing we’ll see.
• I am dying to see Maschine Zeit finished up. I love it so much and believe in it it’s just a matter of time, like everything else.
• I’d like to speak at more cons this year. I have a few lined up, but really any excuse to travel and get out of the house is better than the last.
• I want to read more books this year.
• I want to get back to learning Italian. This entirely novel-writing related.
• And how about a totally arbatrary goal? I want 500 twitter followers by 2011. I have no control over that, it sees like a pretty random thing, so that should be fun to look at next year.

All over the intertubes there are about a million pages worth of advice on how to ‘get past writer’s block.’ I don’t need to rehash any of that, mostly because I don’t believe in writer’s block. (Why? Well, Chuck Wendig said it far more succently than I feel like right now.)

So what do I do when I’m procrastinating instead of writing because I’m having trouble making words go? About a million goofy things, but the only thing I’d actually recommend is getting up and cleaning.* No, really, step away from the desk and clean the office, go do the dishes, get some laundry out of the way.

Why? Because you need to do it anyway, so it’s way better than three and a half hours of computer solitaire. You might not have the wordcount you want yet, but at least you won’t have roaches leaning over your shoulder giving advice on sentence structure. (You know what house/apartment I’m talking about. You KNOW that artist/writer friend. Weird how they’re rarely productive despite their clear lack of procrastination-cleaning. Correlation?)

It gets your blood going, and as Chuck reminds us in his post, your brain actually needs blood to function. (Not to mention the fact that as a writer, if you don’t get blood in your legs pretty regularly you risk getting blood clots AND DYING! You heard me. Clean or die.)

You probably don’t want to clean, anyway, so after a while, getting back to that writing project will be preferable to scrubbing the toilet, and before you know it, your writing a million words a minute just to avoid cleaning the garage.

Your spouse/roommate/family will be way less likely to give you a hard time about ‘getting a real job’ because you aren’t playing another round of World Craft of War and instead making their home nicer to live in.

Messes are distracting. No really, you might be used to living in a hovel. Many are, but at the end of the day most human brains get cluttered in cluttered environments. (Note: I have no scientific data on that, it just figures.)

Cleaning can (and in this context MUST) be a finite activity. If you are on a deadline and have no passion for it, now is not the time to paint the nursery and dig up all the infant clothes to put into said nursery for the upcoming baby. (Really. I can’t do that right now, no matter how much I want to.) Now is the time to say, file all the tax information on the desk, and after that, reconsider your desire to write.

While cleaning, you must be sorting through your writing project in your head. You must be thinking about it, batting it around in your head, finding what parts are preventing you from getting motivation. Like Agatha Christie told us, “the best time to plan a book is while doing the dishes.” Dull, idle tasks + thinking = ideas. It’s math. How can you argue with math? That’s right, you can’t.

Now how to stop Cleaner’s Block, that, I got nothing. Sorry.

*Please note, cleaning as a replacement for anything and everything may in fact have something to do with the fact that I am a few weeks at most away from having this baby, nesting is like that, but the advice remains solid. I think.

What was your first job related to writing, how did you get it?

First thing I ever had published was “Elmer’s Grue,” a short story I submitted for a contest I found on Writing.com.  At the time, I was quite the active member.  I was always posting my work and swapping criticisms with other budding writers.  I was completely awestruck when I was one of the winners.  Me and about 17 or 18 other writers were chosen to be included in Abaculus 2007, an anthology of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories.  The book was the very first release by Leucrota Press.

What’s your #1 piece of advice to other writers, getting started or trying to keep the momentum going?
Never, EVER stop submitting your work!  Submit as much and as often as possible.  The only way you’ll ever get your work out there is through sheer persistance.  One of these days, that “no” will turn into a “yes.”  But you’ll never know when until you try.

Where or from whom do you take writing advice?

I network with other writers quite reguarly, so we swap advice from time to time.  And I sometimes contact more established authors and see if they have any words of wisdom they’d be willing to share.  I always keep an open ear for that kind of thing.

What are you working on now? (if you can mention it)

Well, I’m happy to say that my third novel, Pay Phone, is finished and I’m hoping to see it released in March of 2010.  I’m currently going back and forth from a couple of novels and I’m constantly writing new short stories.

What do you have on the shelves we have to read? (yes, this is a bit like asking which is your favorite child.)

Well, I’m always a cheerleader for Jack Ketchum.  He’s my absolute favorite.  Any of his books will do you just fine, but my absolute favorite is “The Girl Next Door.”  Richard Laymon is another author I quite enjoy and I just recently read one of his earliest works, “The Woods Are Dark.”  Very interesting read and if you have the extra cash for the hardbound limited edition, go for it.  I also LOVED “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris, who’s always a crackup.  There are several more I could list, but I’d need a LOT more room.

Who is your favorite current writer?

Ketchum, definitely.  Nobody writes like him.

What’s unique about writing in the Philly area?

Well, it’s a fantastic city, obviously chock-full of history, and you’ll find interesting people around every corner.  And, how many other horror authors can say they live in the same town as Edgar Allen Poe?

You can read this interview at my examiner blog here and comment there or here to join in on the conversation.

So here’s my reality check.

I’m not the first one to do this. I won’t be the last, either. Writing is a thing of development. Everyday we’re developing better habits, better skills, and better methods. But that isn’t the only thing we’re always developing. We’re developing characters and ideas and settings and all of those other things that make up the stories we create.

Go ahead, look back into the history of say, Phillip Marlowe. He didn’t spring fully formed from the pen of Chandler as he appeared in The Big Sleep. Actually, Marlowe had appeared in a number of short stories with a few other names before he hit his stride in the first novel. Some of that was editorial decisions, but I think a lot of it was Chandler trying to feel out the character before he devoted a whole book to the guy. I’m glad he did. The level of character knowledge and detail Chandler had on Marlowe made him feel real. (That will explain my crush on the boyscout, you understand. It’s the quality of the character design, not because I’m a gooey woman.)

Am I saying you should write the same thing over and over? No, obviously that’s bad writing, or at least, dull writing. What I’m saying is don’t be afraid to practice a scene before you implement it. I’m saying try the same setting a few times to see what characters really ought to live there. I’m saying let your heroine go through a short story or two to be sure you really want her to be a punk rock werewolf hunter before you start writing the whole novel. Maybe in writing her, you’ll discover she’s more exciting as a tax accountant. (Okay, I dare someone to write a tax accountant/werewolf hunter.)

The greats have done it, you’ll do it anyway, might as well pretend like you were planning to do it all along.

[For more on recycling, try this!]

In terms of pedigree, Gregory Frost is a multiple time published author with eight novels to his name, his work in several anthologies and numerous published short stories. He knows enough about writing to teach at a major liberal arts school and is active in the local writing scene. I can’t tell you how lucky I am to get him at the top of my list of interviews.

What was your first job related to writing, how did you get it?

If you define “job” here as something someone paid for (assuming barter counts), the answer is that around 1975, two friends of mine who were in a TV directing class at the University of Iowa, where I was also a student, asked me to write episodes of a faux sf series for them to direct. We’re talking Christmas tree lights for special effects. I took a short story idea I’d written at the time and bastardized it (and believe me that could only have helped it) and wrote three episodes of a time travel series for them about a college student (duh) who figures out that his professor has discovered how to travel not only through time but through alternate timelines, but who as a result gets pulled into an alternate reality himself and discovers a legion of other time travelers, and so forth.  For this piece of journeyman scribbling I was paid in giant cans (“tubes” in Oz-speak) of Foster’s Lager.  That made for huge incentives to finish each piece.

What’s your #1 piece of advice to other writers, getting started or trying to keep the momentum going?

B-I-C: Butt In Chair.  Not that I take my own advice often enough, but that is all there is to it finally.  If you don’t sit down and write, then you will accomplish nothing.  That does not mean you won’t write one or two or twelve novels that are bad, that don’t work or won’t sell.  But if you don’t write them and get to the one that does work, does sell, the rest is hypothetical. You’ll have a hypothetical career. You’ll be writing a book real soon now. I heard Justin Cronin say once that as he was leaving the graduate workshop program at the University of Iowa he asked his advisor (and the head of the program) what he should do now, and the man replied, “Write for ten years.”  He said it was the best advice anyone had given him, and it took him almost exactly ten years to produce his first novel. You can tell someone young that and it doesn’t sound so daunting.  It’s harder to say it to a fifty-year-old who’s always had a hankering to write but repressed it, didn’t act on it, for decades.  All I can tell you is, I’m sorry, if you’re serious you will have to put in the time.  The rest is posturing, and there are plenty of people who are good at that, who go from conference to workshop to conference and learn nothing.  Don’t be one of them.

Where or from whom do you take writing advice?

Depends on what we’re talking about.  If I am looking for feedback on something I’m writing, that might be someone like Karen Joy Fowler or Kelly Link, both of whom volunteered to take time from their own writing to be first readers for my novel, Fitcher’s Brides.  It might be my friends Oz Whiston and Fran Grote, who both have acted as first readers on my last couple of projects.  I think it’s important to have a couple of good readers (who cannot be family members, I’m sorry, but no) to offer impressions of your work; but it’s also important not to use them too often or too early.  I’ve seen people serve up their very rough first drafts to workshop groups, and I think that’s a terrible mistake because once your first readers have seen this work, they’re tainted. You can’t use them reliably again because they will never approach the work as a reader might again. They’ll have a kind of prescience about it, about what’s going to happen, about whose story this is, and that will truly screw up their feedback. You can ask them to look at some specific revisionary element, but they can’t be your first readers twice.

If we’re talking about advice in general, I take it from a lot of places. From other writers that I talk with about writing; from books like Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page, or Carole Burns’ Off the Page.  There is Janet Burroway’s definitive text Writing Fiction, and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. And then there are teaching collections of stories, like Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design, and T.C. Boyle’s Doubletakes. All of those provide insights into writing, into the relationship of the writer to the story and of the story to the reader.  Anything that makes you think about fiction differently, see your writing differently, is good.

What are you working on now?

I just turned in a short story for a commemorative anthology that Greg Schauer, the owner of Between Books (in Claymont, DE) is doing to celebrate his store’s 20^th anniversary.  And I’m trying out working on two things at once, which I have not traditionally done. One, called Unreal Estate, is a supernatural romance mystery, maybe the start of a series, and I’m final drafting (I hope) that.  And some members of the Philadelphia Stories writing group are doing a kind of hive mind writing collective right now, like a stripped down version of NaNoWriMo, so I’m attempting to push through a first draft in a kind of guerilla “take no prisoners” fashion. No idea what that’ll create, because it’s not the way I work traditionally, but I feel like I want to try it out. I’ve gone through my career that way, trying not to do the same thing over and over, which is somewhat antithetical to what publishing likes.  There is another Shadowbridge book on the back burner but I want to get through these other projects first.  The Shadowbridge fantasies are intricate and very much products of the lizard brain, and they don’t come out quickly.

What do you have on the shelves we have to read? (yes, this is a bit like asking which is your favorite child.)

Well, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, a duology, is what’s out and fresh at the moment. Certainly the books I’m proudest of right now (to go with your “favorite child” analogy).  They comprise a large story that flows around and incorporates smaller stories, tales within tales, tales performed on stage, tales that echo something going on in the aspic in which they’re embedded.  It’s probably my 1001 Nights and I don’t expect to repeat that, as it took a long time to develop and emerge.  Some ideas, like the thing I’m approaching guerilla-writing style, come to you with the larger structure in place, comprehensible. Fitcher’s Brides did that. Others, like the Shadowbridge novels, are to me more akin to feeling your way down a flight of stairs in the dark. All you can do is hold onto the railing and hope none of the treads is missing.

Who is your favorite current writer?

I’m right now re-reading and enjoying Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I haven’t read since I was a teen.  I just finished Dennis Tafoya’s extraordinary first novel, Dope Thief, which reads like poetry written in broken glass.  But if forced to pick one, I’ve become terribly enamored of Christopher Brookmyre, a mad Scots writer of mad comic thrillers like Quite Ugly One Morning and A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away.  He’s evil and brilliant, and between him and all the Donald Westlake “Dortmunders” I still have to read, I’ve got my really exceptional popcorn books sewn up for years to come.

What’s unique about writing in the Philly area?

The community of writers around here is extraordinary.  There’s a strong science fiction community, with writers galore.  I’m a member of the Philadelphia Liars Club, which includes local authors such as Jonathan Maberry, L.A. Banks, Kelly Simmons, William Lashner, Jon McGoran, and Merry Jones; our styles and stories are incredibly varied, but what a band of outlaws to belong to.  I’m friends with exceptional local poets like Leonard Gontarek and Nathalie Anderson, and artists and illustrators like Charley Parker and Rich Grote.  So I like the way the layers overlap, and communities aren’t insular.  I think one of the things that I find sad is how few local independent bookshops there are.  That’s maybe not unique in this universe of corporate rapacity, but with a literary community that includes Kelly Writers House and the Free Library author series, I hate seeing my world go to the behemoths.

So, here’s a local gentleman who knows his stuff. I look forward to picking up some of his recomendations and I know the Shadowbridge books have just jumped to the top of my TBR list.  I hope you’ll join me in thanking Mr. Frost for taking the time.

(See this interview also at the Philadelphia Examiner page here.)

So I’ve had some time to process the Writers’ Convention I went to this weekend.  I have a notebook full of notes and thoughts and I realize how few of them will actually apply to anything but my own work, this will be ironic soon. (What, ten years of pretending to be a writer, a year or two with a bit of success at it, and NOW I actually think about plot construction for the first time in my life? Yeah, I win the internet.)

The thing that I couldn’t get past most of the time, is how strange the writer is as an animal, especially when it’s free range and face to face with its own species. Curious, occasionally friendly, and by some staggering percentage, utterly unable to think about things outside of the terms of their own needs. (I’m not saying this is a universal truth, just what I observed this weekend.)

Now granted, I’ll give you that all of those writers there spent a few hundred dollars to learn the few things they needed to make their manuscript the next DaVinci Code. I can’t blame them for having their heads pretty far up their own manuscripts. I know I tend to think and relate new information to things I already know or understand, that’s how my brain works, but when I’m in a large learning space I do try to take that information and make it universal. I learn more and others around me do as well. (Did I mention I couldn’t keep my damn mouth shut through most of the workshops? I had a few people, speakers included, thank me, so I guess I wasn’t too obnoxious.)

I also saw a non internet troll. It was fantastic. A grown man in his mid to late fifties. A man who at least pretend to have a real career as a writer, and so you would think he had good things to do with his time and money. Like any internet troll, apparently not. He sat in a class and spent the whole time muttering his side comments to someone beside him. Eventually it got so obvious and irritating that the speaker stopped and asked him what his issue was with what she was saying.  Being a troll, he backed off, saying that wasn’t the time and place. Better still, he spent the rest of the day (at least from what I could tell, he was prevalent in the break room) complaining to any and all how he was ‘yelled at’ by one of the speakers. When, after a while, someone who had been in the first class came in to try and still his belly aching a bit, he got up and left saying ‘they just don’t understand the point.’ Classic troll behavior, and best of all, this guy had never even been on the internet! (He’s a letter writer, he explained, dozens of pages of letters a week.) Funny how it never occurred to me that such a thing could exist outside of the net.

There were questions at panels so narrow and specific to a writer’s work that the panelist couldn’t possibly answer it. Loud personal phone calls in public places. More complaining about minutia then you could shake a complaint form at, and of course all of it coming from people who had been to this conference a dozen times before and would go a dozen times again, age permitting.

Don’t get me wrong, I ran into a lot of people who were just fantastic, people who I hope to some day call peers. There’s one young lady who has, no kidding, ACTUALLY done something new with the standard vampire novel, and I am dying to be her pal when she’s rich and famous. I had a blast and learned things at every turn, but then, that’s what I wanted out of that conference. I wonder if I’d gone into it wanting to ‘fix’ my manuscript or land an agent or find something to complain about, that’s just what I would have found.

Long ramble short, really, ladies and gentleman, have fun if you’re going to go. If not, I’m sure you can find things at home to bitch about.

I was watching, mind you, and got my hands on her fat little trunk before she got all the way over the edge, but it was clear her intent. Yes, she wanted to crawl off the bed. No, she didn’t know it would hurt her. She hasn’t any concept of ‘I could get hurt,’ or ‘that might be scary.”

In fact, she really has no real sense of fear. Now, don’t get me wrong, she’ll get afraid after the fact. Also the dark. But things that she can see and reach for, things she can touch or taste, or somehow experience, no, she hasn’t any fear. She just reaches and pushes and explores with little concern for the consequences.

Sometimes, she’ll storm her way across the couch at a full crawling clip towards the desk where my husbands computer sits. The purpose for this? Apparently, her only desire is to grab on to the printer/scanner monstrosity on his desk and hang from it. There’s no where else she could go on the desk. She just wants to hang and climb and challenge herself, and gravity be damned! My husband thinks her suicidal need to hang from the printer/scanner has something to do with scanning her butt like those drunk secretaries do at company Christmas parties.

I’ve even found her attempting to climb my book shelf. Maybe to get at my books, or maybe, more likely, just to climb -something.-

I remember shortly after she was born. She would roll onto her stomach and cry and cry, mostly we figured, in frustration that she couldn’t move. She couldn’t go. It was so sad to watch her little head bob up and down, and her little feet kick no where to get her somewhere. The moment when she first got to her knees and really honestly crawled for the first time, she literally squealed with joy. Joy at being able to move and be in control. The dangers and perils that come of being in charge of your own movements just don’t matter. Moving matters.

Willy Shakespeare says ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.’

What does this have to do with creating, with writing? To be honest, I didn’t know at first, I just watched my daughter and her fearlessness and kept being nagged by a sense that there was something I ought to learn in it. I realized it was trait in her that I respected, and envied it a little. Which is when it occurred to me, of course, I’m a dummy. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of putting my out there that it’s going to be rejected. That after all this time I’m going to find out I was never a ‘real writer’ after all. Whatever that means. I was afraid to take a risk just because there might be a consequence.

In that silly little moment of realization, I put together what my daughter was trying to teach me, unknowingly perhaps, when she tried to crawl off the edge of the bed.

I’ve decided to shrug off fear and doubt, and dive head first into the thing I’m the most afraid of. (You know, other than motherhood, ’cause that’s one I was gleefully thrown into, rather than dove.) So I’m putting my writing out there, out everywhere. I’m biting back my fear and taking a chance, because, like my daughter, I don’t know if I’m absolutely going to fall if I climb up on the scanner, and so what if I do? I’ve got plenty of people who love me and will catch me.

So anyway, thank you Tina, for being fearless, and reminding me how. /gooey mom time.

Also: Updates on the Anthology I was included in, you can download a sneak preview.

Three of my White Wolf titles are out, buy them at your local Dork Store. Immortals, Ancient Mysteries, Ancient Bloodlines.

And, my article for Pyramid Magazine is now out, here.

You can read more about it here, including the bios of some of the other writers involved. David Wellington? Are you kidding me!? I’m having a fangirl moment. Shane Hensley might be one of the nicest guys on the internet. Remind me later to tell you what an idiot I am and how it involves that kind gentleman. Who doesn’t love Deadlands? I’m not ashamed to see my name below any of the names included.

So go get your preoder out of the way. I’ll be waiting right here.