Dead Tree Books

I want to have the option to own my book in dead tree form someday. Books printed on paper, in other words; you know, that thing we used to use back in grade school to write reports and sometimes print out in TPS reports (with cover sheets!) and other fun stuff like that. Currently, this is the format that books are made into. Format may not be the correct word. Let's call it a medium.

The problem is, I want to walk into a brick and mortar store and buy a dead tree book some day, and yet the world seems to think that both of these things are archaic and doomed to be as relevant as horseshoes and blacksmiths are in today's world. Everything is going to be e-books and blogs and whatever, which makes it somewhat amusing to me that I'm pondering the very subject on a blog.

Who Owns The Story?

After yesterday's brief foray outside of my normal stomping grounds, I return to you with a post that is the bread and butter of this blog: more randomly formed, barely cogent thoughts about writing from somebody hardly qualified to be so opinionated. But that's what blogs are all about, baby; you don't need to know what you're talking about to feel strongly about a thing. You just need to be convincing. Or not even convincing; interesting would probably do just fine, in a pinch.

I was looking over the manuscript for "the book formerly known as the Fallen, except there's already like a hundred goddamn books with that title, so some good friends helped me come up with a much better title." No, that's not the new title; it's just a personal anecdote that's masquerading as the title, since this new title is so good and for some reason, I'm feeling strangely protective of it at the moment. I don't know. It's also why I haven't posted any chapters or excerpts yet. I just have this feeling, like that this thing is a fledgling and if I let too many people touch it, its mother won't take it back and it will starve to death or be eaten by a hawk.

Under Fire

I'd like to talk about something different today. And don't worry, I'm totally sober right now, so it won't be a long, rambling, mostly pointless discussion about deserts, or whatever. Most of the time, I use this space to talk about writing and either the struggles of trying to succeed as a writer, or just general thoughts on the medium. Because, you know, the musings of an unpublished fiction writer are totally important and this isn't at all an exercise in my own narcissism. Nope.

Today at work, I had my first incident. By incident, I mean a situation in which I was required to take action that included calling an ambulance, relaying information to the dispatcher, keeping calm, etc. etc. I'm keeping the description vague, since I use my real name on this blog, it's conceivable that somebody could make the necessary leaps of logic and piece together the real story and I'd rather respect the privacy of others. Anyway, the details are not important. Sufficient to say, an individual needed help, I helped, and remained calm while doing so. Was it a life threatening situation? Not for me. For the other individual? Maybe. I'm not a doctor. Hard to say where the line is between actual emergency and imagined one; most of the time, you won't find out until it's all said and done, and God help you if you assumed incorrectly that it was all imagined.

The Time Between

The period of time between projects is a weird place to be. You've just come off the high of having achieved your goal and finished your novel (or whatever). You've tasted some delicious accomplishment and hopefully, the process of finishing a draft has the inspirational effect of making you feel as though you're ready to dive headfirst into your next project. But should you do that?

Yesterday felt very weird. I had already told myself that I was going to take the day off; I mean, hell, I deserve some time away from thinking about all of this stuff. In his memoir "On Writing," Stephen King advises taking a week or two off before you start the second draft, so that you can distance yourself from the whole thing and come at the work with fresh eyes. I think that this is a good idea and plan to give myself that week. But even though, for one small, brief moment, this period of "not-writing" is justifiable, even permissible, it still feels like I should be doing something. Somewhere in the back of my, ideas are already begining to faintly stir. "The Next Book" begins to loom on the horizon of my consciousness, tantalizing and ethereal. What will I do next? I can do anything!

Being Done

I finished the first draft of my second novel today. You may be wondering why I said "second novel." Well, that's because the first novel is an absolutely horrible swords-and-sorcery fantasy that I began writing when I was fourteen. I finished it and then began writing a sequel and somewhere along the way, I completely lost interest in it. Both works are sitting on my hard drive to this day and both are somewhere around 88,000 words or so. Maybe some day I'll revisit them; hopefully, that will be after I'm super famous and people will enjoy them just because I wrote them, not because either book is actually any good.

Or maybe they'll just sit there in digital space until the end of time. That's pretty good, too.