Why, hello there!

You know that thing, where you think you did a thing, but you actually forgot to do that thing? I did that thing.

I decided a good while ago to call it a wrap on my daily video post. It was fun for a bit, I learned a lot, but it and me were running out of steam.

I had meant to pop over here and do a blog post about it. Imagine my surprise today (weeks later) when I discovered there was no such post in existence. Whoops!

That’s the long and short of it, in terms of the videos. An experiment that had run its course. Might I do more video in the future? Ah, anything’s possible.

Here’s what I am working on:

-Book 5 of the Spellbound Railway is at 65000 words and growing. Hopefully I can get the first draft done by the end of summer, but summer is a time of anarchy so no promises

-the complicated secret project is still complicated but becoming more likely as days go by. Think subscription-based serial fiction, a chapter at a time, with additional background and side story bits for the premium buyers.

-a growing sense of dread over the deteriorating state of geopolitics.

-maybe renting some drums to be a two man band with the lad.

More of me, now in video form

First, the boring ol’ updates:

-Book 5, the final, totally last, all done instalment of the ‘Spellbound Railway’ (which most people just call the WitchKids series, despite my feeble protestations) is underway. I will finish the chapter summary by the end of this year and launch myself flailing and shrieking at the first draft in early 2018.

-secretive new project is secretly in the planning stage, centred around that detective thriller that has bad people doing bad things. Mid-2018 is when it potentially sheds its secretive skin and prances about in all it’s gory strange glory.

And on to new business!

I have advice! Writing advice! And I am going to capture it raw and fresh each work morning in a video segment I call ‘Bad Writer Advice’. Here’s the first video, explaining the whole thing.

You ask, quite rightly, why I would shove bad advice down your already engorged gullet. I would answer that all advice is bad…unless it works. And once I got over my own cleverness, I would explain it like this: following advice is like running through a maze with hints being yelled back from someone else in the maze. More often than not, their advice will lead down dead end alleys and wrong turns, chewing up time and effort. If you are lucky, you’ll pick up a few useful ideas from these wrong turns. And occasionally, the advice will be exactly what you need and you’ll find the end of the maze. Hurray for you!

So by noon each work day, I’ll have a (less than) 5 minute video prepared hot and ready for you over here on my youtube channel. Vacations will happen and you will not get videos during that time. the videos will be unpolished. They will have no production values at all. But they will be an honest look into my daily writing process, warts and all. (Please note: no actual warts will be displayed. Ew)

Making Ugly Art

ugliness

I can’t pretend that high artistic aspirations have ever driven me. I aim for an entertaining story to amuse myself and the audience (such as it is). I would very much like to be the aloof creator who sends their work out to the public and sneers in neglectful disdain at the response.

But I’m not that guy. I want people to like my work, in part because it is too deeply linked to my sense of self. Liking my book=liking me. (By the way, this is an issue I need to get over, because I cannot go hide under a pile of blankets and sob each and every time someone doesn’t like my work.) Other than the routine rejections from various publishers and literary agents, though, there hasn’t been a lot of negative response. And then I wrote an ugly story.

Ugly? Yes, ugly. It is full of bad people doing bad things, to each other and to strangers (I talked about the story in this old post). It’s a good book, the best I’ve written so far, but it is rough. Violent, mean, bloody, gory, offensive, etc. Everything that I have written and foisted onto the public up until this point has been easy to consume and support. This book is not. One advance reader had to put the book down and walk away. Two others struggled to get past the first chapter (but enjoyed the rest of the book once they did).

So now I am caught between Scylla and Charybdis (as an aside, I spelled that correctly the first time and I am super-proud of my self for doing so. Tiny wins!). One one hand, I want people to have fun while reading my books. On the other hand, I have to write the story as it shows up in my mind. If I change it, I open the door to BEING WRONG, and once that door is open, the hateful imp in the back of my mind will insist that EVERYTHING I DO IS WRONG. I really don’t care for that imp.

And there is a small but feisty element of artist’s arrogance in play as well: who the hell are you, audience, to tell me what to do? Buzz off, jerks. I wrote this. It’s mine and I’ll do what I want. This is not an overly…helpful attitude to have. Some confidence is good. Aggressively ignoring feedback is not.

(sidenote: in searching for an image to feature in this post, I stumbled across the cover for the book ‘On Ugliness‘,which looks at humanity’s fascination with ugliness in art. Intriguing. )