Everybody's blogging, blogging

A number of my friends with blogs seem to be emerging from their own quiescent blog-hiatuses of late, which is a wonderful thing to see, especially when one's friends are as entertaining and incisive as mine tend to be.

My dear friend Gilgamesh -- terror to gods and man alike -- has begun blogging again at Gilgamesh In The Land Of The Dead after several years of down time. (To be fair, he really did have several years worth of stuff to get through).

My dear friend Psyche -- terror to gods, man, and several other categories of being -- never really stopped blogging at Psyche's Acorn, but her blogging certainly seems to be more frequent of late. (She had several years worth of stuff to get through, too, but managed to blog anyway. I've long since gotten used to being an underachiever in comparison; I simply accept her awesomesauciness and encourage you to do the same).

They are exceptionally good writers, thoughtful and reflective, with interesting and valuable things to say. As such, I recommend them both to your attention.

But that isn't why I'm thinking about them. No, on the contrary, the real reason I mention them is, as usual, all about me, me, me.

When I started Back From Erstwhile, I thought of it as a process blog. Over time, as my updates became less frequent, I fell away from that; it's hard to focus on a process you only check in with people about a handful of times a year.

(Six posts apiece in 2009 and 2010. Two in 2011.)

But seeing how Gilgamesh and Psyche -- and what it is with my friends and mythologically-derived online pseudonyms? -- use their blogs has me thinking about what I've been doing with this thing, and what I want to do with it.

I'd really like to talk more about my process, about my efforts to professionalize (or re-professionalize) myself as a writer. About what's happening with my various projects, and when things are going well versus when they aren't. Gilgamesh and Psyche are both remarkably direct and honest about what goes on in their lives, which is something that I with my tendencies towards a narrow focus on my writing, and towards understating and deprecating my own feelings, greatly admire.

The problem for me comes when things aren't going well. I'm very much a "good news" person. If I can't report a success, I don't like to say much of anything. I like being thought well of. I don't much like conflict or confrontation.

This has gotten me in trouble at different times in my life, in different roles, because when things go wrong, I've been known to flounder trying to fix them on my own -- or worse, ignore them and hope they'll go away -- when telling people that there was a problem would have been the simplest and best way forward.

In the case of blogging, it means that my desire to post the positive and my reticence about either baseless hype or going off-topic with random bloviating* leads to reluctance, even a sense of shame, about posting my not-good-news here. That was evident in the way the "haven't been able to write this week" posts in the first couple of years trailed off into my later extended blog silences.

I'm tired of extended blog silences.

Now, anyone who follows more than one blog knows that the resolution to post more frequently is the inevitable precursor to a blog that is never updated again, so I'm not going to resolve to post more frequently.

What I am going to try to do, is to post more of a variety of things again. And I'm going to try to get more personal, more open, in at least some of what I post. This goes against the grain, and it's a bit scary for me. I've described my approach to blogging in the past as Business Casual, and it's taken a lot of thinking to shift what I think is appropriate for me to share online.

What I seem to have landed on, is that I can't both always and only be the bearer of good tidings, and also tell you the truth about myself, and what I do, and what I care about. Because there is too much that 's important to me that isn't good news, and that does involve me taking a stand and risk causing a conflict or confrontation.

As for what all this means in terms of content here... I don't really know yet, to be honest. I have a great many ideas, but most of them are pretty nebulous at the moment, and it all boils down to "post more and different stuff". If you have thoughts on what sort of topics you'd like to see me touching on, by all means drop me a comment and share them. (I checked out the Blogger analytics today, and it turns out I have readers; I had no idea).

Until then, thank you to my friends, Alias Gilgamesh and The One They Call Psyche, for sharing so much of yourselves, and for inspiring me to more that's better, and truer.

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* Not that I've never bloviated here; far from it. But I never feel entirely good about it, afterwards.

This Is What I'm Doing: February 2012 Edition

So, as it turns out, this February isn’t going to see a big push on a side project. There are a couple of reasons for that, one negative, and one positive. I’m a give-me-the-bad-news-first person, so we’re going to start with that.

Reason #1: January Kind of Kicked my Butt

Things were busier than ever at home, work went crazy at the same time, which for some reason made it harder for me to sleep, and I had a low-grade cold for a while. I managed to keep writing, but not to the degree I was hoping for. So I’m a bit behind where I wanted to be. I had planned to finish the short story I’ve been working on, then see what the status was with the alpha readers critiquing my novel, and determine if I had the time to do that side project. As it turns out, I’m still working on the short story. I really want to finish it before I turn my attention to the next, bigger thing. Because if I set this aside for something even more involved, FSM only knows when I’m going to get back to it. Heinlein’s Second Rule of Writing is “You Must Finish What You Start”, and I’m in complete agreement. So, work on the short story continues, albeit slowly.

But after that…? Well, that takes us to the good reason.

Reason #2: The Alphas Have Spoken

I’ve now heard from and, when it was possible, met with my alpha readers. The feedback I received was in every case really detailed and thoughtful, and it’s already been incredibly valuable to me. What that means, though, is that I’m now burning to get back to the novel. I have plot holes to fix, characters to buff, and a world to embroider in more detail. I know where the problems are, and – importantly – I know they’re fixable.

So, when I finish this short story, and that should be soon, I plan to turn my attention back to the novel and do the second draft. Ironically, with the insight my readers have provided, it will probably go a lot more quickly than what was supposed to be the polish did. Be that as it may, the upshot is that I don’t have a hole in the middle of February to fit in a new project. I am rich in projects. I’m projected-up. Burgeoning with projects, that’s me.

Indeed, since Patrick, the artist on Cold Iron Badge, has suggested that it’s time to start getting a script down for Book 2 of our comic, I might be a little too rich in projects. But that’s just a time-management problem. And a getting-my-butt-in-the-chair-and-actually-writing problem.

It may not be My Own Private NaNoWriMo, what with it not being something new or taking place over a month, but it’ll involve lots of Wri, that’s for certain. There’ll be more updates as I move forward with this crazy process and its inevitable frustrations, I’m sure. Talk to you then, probably while pulling my hair out.

Ebooks: How the #*%& do they work?!

I was going through some files the other day, and I came across a flyer that got dropped off at our table at last fall’s Word On The Street, where Greg Beettam and I were (in our inimitable fashion), working to get copies of the Xeno’s Arrow and Cold Iron Badge books into the hands of passers-by. In exchange for, you know, money.

 

This happens from time to time, especially at free shows like Word On The Street, which by design is a big public event that anyone and everyone can attend; people come by the table where we’re trying to sell things, and try to sell US something. It’s sometimes distracting, and sometimes annoying – we, after all, paid for our table, unlike random passer-by-guy with a flyer – but sometimes it leads to interesting and potentially valuable connections and leads.

 

I’m still not sure what category this guy with this flyer fall into, and so I’m taking my question to you.

 

This flyer was for a company that offers services in creating ebooks for clients. The actual work, that is, of creating files and setting up accounts with the various providers of ebooks to sell them. I’m not entirely clear whether this outfit was also offering to manage said accounts – I don’t have the flyer in front of me. They were, I remember, also offering to set up and manage social media accounts for clients, which set off some of my alarm bells, because while a large company might need to contract with someone else to manage their social media profile due to their size and the volume of work involved, the sort of small entrepreneurial business this guy and this flyer were obviously targeting didn’t really need someone else to set up their Facebook page, or to be them on Twitter.

 

But here’s the thing: When it comes to ebooks, Greg and I don’t know what we don’t know. We’ve tried many different ways to get our work out and into the hands of readers over the years, with what to spare my own ego I’m going to call mixed degrees of success. We haven’t tried ebooks yet; for some time, there didn’t seem to be much of a need. But over the past year or so, everything has changed. Self-publishing via ebooks is now more than a sideline for many creators. Ebooks of one sort or another are very clearly now a huge and growing part of the market, and for independent creators like us, they represent a potentially huge pool of readers who’ve never been exposed to our work before. And we don’t need to put a whole lot of labour into making the work ready for that audience – that part is done, we did it years ago. So we have years-old sweat equity (and financial equity) invested. Nothing is going to bring back that sweat or money, but we have the work. Now, it can either do nothing, or make us back some money.

 

As I implied at the top of this post, neither Greg nor I has any objections to money, and this seems like it might be a great way to get some, and finally reach the audience we always wanted too.

 

The problem – well, the major problem – is that neither of us knows much about ebooks, and we especially don’t know about creating them or getting them onto the various online sellers (Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, etc.)

 

So we don’t know how much work is involved, or how much technical acumen is required to do the job right. We don’t know about the added complications that might result from the fact that our work is comics, which involves graphics that take up more memory and require higher resolutions. We don’t know if the company this flyer advertised is providing a service we as neophytes will absolutely need, or if they’re just taking advantage of people who don’t know how easily they could make ebooks themselves.

 

That’s my question for you: Do we need to contract a service provider to take our work, and turn it into ebooks? Or can we do it ourselves? How much knowledge, time and expense are involved? And is it different for graphic novels and prose?

 

Enlighten me, please!

In which I Emerge from an Overused Metaphor into the Light of Some Other Cliche

Sweet FSM, have I really not updated this since last April? Over eight months of silent running? Seriously?

Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I kind of had a rough second half of 2011 from a creative standpoint. When I last wrote here, my plan was to let the novel rest for a month or so, then do a quick polish and get the resulting draft out to my alpha readers. I figured that I’d get their feedback over the summer, have the rewrite finished by the end of October, send it out to my beta readers, get their feedback, and have a finished draft ready to release into the wild by the end of the year. I figured I’d provide updates on all the steps here, as they happened.

But they didn’t happen. They really, really didn’t happen.

What was supposed to be a quick polish, fixing formatting and typos and patching plot holes and obvious mistakes, turned into a slog and a half. I ran into technical problems in trying to fix those formatting errors than made the whole job seem futile – namely, trying to carry on the project moving between our desktop at home and my netbook, which have different operating systems and word processing software, which meant that the same formatting errors kept re-appearing when I went from system to system. Mostly, it was the indentation of paragraphs disappearing and needing to be re-done, which sounds trivial, but have you ever tried indenting every single paragraph in a 95,000-word document? Yeah, okay, First World Problem for sure, but unquestionably time-consuming.

But it was the creative side that was the real bugbear. All I could see were problems, and the problems seemed insurmountably large. When all you can see are the holes, you can lose sight of the road ahead, and that’s what happened to me.

But finally – finally, in late December – I’d had enough. I buckled down, filled in the holes that were blocking my progress, and decided to worry about the formatting later. More importantly, I realized that I couldn’t fix everything at once. What I needed was the draft to be in good enough shape for other people to look at, so they can help me prioritize what to fix. Maybe some of the things I think are problems aren’t. Maybe I’m not seeing other problems that are much more important. Maybe fixing one will obviate the need to fix another, for whatever reason.

It was the perfect being the enemy of the good again. I recognized that I was not going to be perfect, and I forgave myself for it, and I moved the heck on.

I’m going to move the heck on from not having posted here in so long too. I was embarrassed at not having any progress to report. That was probably silly, but it’s part of the larger issue I was grappling with, of not being able to be okay with imperfection.

So, here’s where things are at: The draft of the novel, which is now called Cold Iron Summer, by the way, went out to my alpha readers just before Christmas. It’s with most of them now. I’m going to take advantage of the break and try to cleanse my creative palate – I’m working on a short story that I want to finish by the end of January, something with a very different feel and flavour.

After that, I’ll check in with my beloved and, by that point, long-suffering alpha readers, and see when they expect to be ready to provide feedback.

Then I’ll do a lot of listening.

Then comes the rewrite.

Oh, depending on the turnaround time for feedback from the alphas, I may try to fit in another project in February, but that’s very up in the air.

As for what’s next for this blog? Hmm. I feel unstuck at last, and I think it will do me good (and you no harm) for me to keep writing here about my process as I keep working on this project. I’m going to try not to fall into the same trap again, try not to get stuck. And I’m going to try not to let the internet equivalent of a geological age pass before my next update.

It’ll be hard; the post-holiday doldrums really hit me over January and while I’m feeling unstuck creatively, I’m feeling sick, tired and up to my knees in the mire in a few other key respects. But those times are going to happen, in life. I have to remind myself that nothing is ever going to be perfect, and that waiting for things to be perfect is just a recipe for inaction.  

I take a deep breath. I forgive myself and resolve to do better. I survey the road ahead. I can see a path, despite obstacles, roadblocks, pothole and plotholes. I take a step, and then another.

And I move ahead. Onward.

Holy Guacamole. I Wrote A Novel.

I finished the first draft of the novel last Sunday night. It weighs in at 95,007 words (via MS Office’s word count, which is a little lower than Open Office’s word count; I dunno why). I’m still sort of floating on the great release of having actually gotten it done. There were times that I wasn’t sure I’d ever finish the damn thing. I wondered if I was really cut out to write a novel.

It turns out that I am.

I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever mentioned the working title here; it’s ‘All That Glitters’, but I suspect that won’t be what it ends up being called. It’s not… I don’t know… punchy enough, maybe? Memorable enough? Even the members of my writers group don’t actually refer to it by that title. But that’s a second draft problem.

Second Draft

For now, as recommended by everyone who’s actually written and published a novel, I’m going to let the manuscript rest for at least a few weeks. Then, after I can look at it with fresher eyes, I’ll go back and do a rewrite. Some of that will be simple clean-up – removing excess verbiage. Some of it will be making sure the characters have consistent voices. Some of it will be filling the plot holes I danced around in my mad rush to the finish. And, because I was really pantsing my way through the first draft, and was figuring out what the story was while I was writing it, I need to go back and take out everything that isn’t the story.

What happens then?

Then the second draft will go out to my Alpha Readers. Alpha Readers are the people a writer trusts to give valuable, high-level feedback on a draft. The people whose eyes are keen enough, whose craft is strong enough, to be able to untease any big picture problems and – this part is important – suggest solutions. They bring a writer’s or editor’s mind to the proceedings.  

Third Draft

After the Alphas have their say will come (I’m sure) another rewrite, after which the book will go out to, you guessed it, Beta Readers. Beta Readers can fill a few niches. They can be resources for specific subjects the writer doesn’t know much about (guns, or the law, or knitting, or whatever), or copy-editors. Some of the most valuable Betas bring the perspective of engaged, passionate readers who will be taking in the story as a reader would, and will spot any problems or plot holes that would trouble a passionate reader.

And after that?

After that, one final polish to fix any problems the Betas spot. And then it should be ready to go out to agents. Which will be a whole ‘nother thing. I’d like to document that process here, with an appropriate level of discretion (for instance, I won’t be naming the agencies I send my manuscript out to, or the ones that reject it, but I’ll probably describe the process, without names).

And that’s not all!

Of course, the novel isn’t all that I’ve been doing or thinking about, not by a long shot. There’s my family, and my job. And while All That Glitters is resting between drafts, I have a couple of other writing projects to get off the back-burner and get busy with. I’m working with Patrick on the outline for Book 2 of our webcomic Cold Iron Badge. And Nicole and I are going to be collaborating on a project that’s both new and old, and that promises to be lots of fun to write. But as a wise hamster-narrating-disembodied-voice used to say, that’s another story. But it’s one you’ll hear about sooner or later. And, since I also hope to blog more frequently going forward, may I humbly suggest that you cast an occasional eye to this space for that news and those updates?

My Own Private NaNoWriMo

One of my resolutions going in to 2011 was to write more, and more regularly. I've been tired and frustrated with spinning my wheels, and not making as much progress as I want to on my projects. Because I don't just want to be a writer; I want to professionalize my career, and that means writing, re-writing, and polishing something that I can take to the market.

My current Big Project is a novel, my first. As though of you who follow my irregular updates here, it's an urban fantasy with the working title 'All That Glitters' that shares a setting with my webcomic Cold Iron Badge. It's shaping up to be pretty darned good, if I do say so myself. But I have to finish the damn thing.

Industry-standard length for a fantasy novel is in the range of 90,000 to 120,000 words. Urban fantasy generally occupies the lower end of that range, probably because there's less need for world-building and scene-setting.

But even 90,000 words is far longer than anything I've even written before.

As 2010 wound down, the manuscript for All That Glitters was sitting at a word count of around 44,000; nowhere near done. The problem wasn't the direction of the story, or the ideas. The problem was getting the damned words on the page.

Something needed to be done.

I am a big proponent of goal-setting as a motivator. I like giving myself a BHAG (a "big hairy audacious goal") and then telling people about it to ensure some external accountability. It doesn't always work, and it can be frustrating and embarrassing when I fail, but I've found that it works much better for me than NOT setting a goal does*.

So, partly inspired by Mur Lafferty's podcast I Should Be Writing**, I came up with an idea for a Goal that was Big, Hairy and Audacious.

I decided to make January, 2011 My Own Private NaNoWriMo.

This probably requires some explanation. NaNoWriMo is 'National Novel Writing Month', the annual event held each November to encourage new and aspiring writers to set and meet the goal of writing 50,000 words of prose in a month. People from all over the world participate; there's a whole community that's formed around the event. It's a lot of fun, but it's fun that I generally pass on, because I often don’t have the time, and I'm not big on the community aspect; I get about as much socializing with other writers as I need from shop talk with my writers group and a few other peers.

But that meant, I realized, there was no reason not to have my own NaNoWriMo any time I wanted.

I chose January 4 to February 3, 2011, and I started writing, with a goal of trying for 50,000 words. That would have put me within striking distance of finishing the novel, at least in terms of word count.

(Word count, as my friend and fellow writer Nicole points out, is in many ways a completely irrelevant and even counterproductive measure, since it has nothing to do with the narrative; it's akin to measuring the value of an ambulance by looking at the mileage. The story should unfold for exactly as long as is needed to tell it, no shorter, no longer. And that's true; but word count does give me a clear measure of whether I've been producing. Since productivity, not the shape of the narrative, has been my sticking point, it's a good metric in that sense.)

So, how did it go?

I'd call it a qualified success. I didn't write every day, but I came closer to writing every day over an extended period of time than I ever have. I didn't write 50,000 words, but what I did write -- over 23,000 -- was more over a single month than I ever have.

Not bad, in other words.

Now, a few days after My Own Private NaNoWriMo, the manuscript is at just about 70,000 words. That means that, if I can maintain this level of output through, say, the end of February, I'll really be nearing the end (and not just in terms of word count; I can see the story threads starting to come together, and can feel the narrative crescendo building. Hoo boy, can I. The next 30,000 or so words are going to be FUN).

Ideally, of course, I'd like to do better than I did in January; I had too many non-writing hiccup days and days with very little writing. If I can make a good January day into an average February day, my productivity will increase substantially. I just proved what I can do, when I try. Now the only thing I need to do is keep at it. I hope to be able to have real grounds for bragging soon; watch this space for updates (you can also follow me on Twitter. I’m @Stephen_GM and I often post about my word count there).

I set out to climb a mountain, and conquered the lower slopes. That’s something to be proud of; the view from here is pretty nice.

But I bet it’s even better at the top. And I intend to find out. Onward!

 

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*Like Churchill said about democracy: It's the worst system, except for all the others.  

**Which I recommend to everyone, to the degree that I think I’ll do another blog post where I talk about ISBW, and why you should be following it, at length.

In September I Will Do Better

It’s September all of a sudden, but I’m much too busy for my usual where-did-the-summer-go/where-did-the-year-go/where-did-the-decade-go shtick.

 

My life, as per usual, is much busier than it is productive, and I’m a little sad to see another summer gone without having made as much progress with my projects as I’d like. I suspect I’m being a little too hard on myself – I am, after all, a grown-up-ish person with a job and a family, and the summer is not one big Calvin & Hobbes-esque lazy Sunday for me anymore.

 

Still and all, I have twinges of disappointment. Other the other hand,  I have kids going to school in a few days, and I remember going to school myself, and so for me, like for a lot of other people, September is the Other New Year, a beginning, an opportunity to reflect, take stock and set goals.

 

Progress on The Novel is… slow. But slow is better than non-existent, and I hope to bear down for another real push this month. It’ll help that my writers group will be starting up again in the fall; I think a deadline or two will help motivate me.

 

There’s actually a lot happening on the comics front, although most of it still isn’t quite ready for a big public announcement. I finished the script for the final chapter of the first book of Cold Iron Badge, and Patrick is already working away on it with his mad skillz.

 

I haven’t been getting to the gym as much as I wanted, and I definitely haven’t been eating as virtuously as I should. The food thing just requires willpower, and although pie is my Kryptonite, I’m feeling stronger and more optimistic as the Other New Year begins. The gym… well, like I said, the kids are starting school, and without going all blah-blah true confessions on you, I can say that this will lead to some complications with attendant scheduling hiccups that will need to be overcome. The gym may get caught in the crossfire. If it does... hmm, I dunno, I might just have to climb the stairs in our building a couple of times every night for a while. One thing I’m certain of is that I really need to get serious, now, about making a change for the better.

 

Because it’s time. It’s the Other New Year. We’re heading into my favourite season. It’s a time for optimism that leads to action, for getting things done and doing them well. For being healthier, more productive and happier.

 

It’s September, and I’m going to do better.

Continuity Conundrum

I’m used by now to things not going exactly as planned, but the past couple of months have been both frustrating and disappointing, regardless. I really lost the thread of both exercising and writing. Time management has been an even bigger challenge than usual, and the fact that it’s turned into a nasty-humid, vicious-hot summer so far hasn’t helped.

It hasn’t been entirely unproductive. I’ve been working with my good friend N.W. on a Secret Project. This time I’m not just being goofily coy; this is something I need to keep under my hat for the time being*. Partly because right now, there is no news, and it’s possible nothing may come of it – whether or not it goes ahead is up to a third party. But if we get that “yea”, it will be very exciting, and represent a major step forward for both me and N.W. I’ll give real details when I can.

That being said, I have yet to make real headway on the novel. The first draft is on the go, but still not much more than 25% done. I’m hoping to break my logjam and move forward over the rest of the summer; I finally got back to it today and managed to add about 500 words. That represents less than an hour of work, so if I can swing devoting more time than just my lunch hour to the project, I might actually start getting somewhere.

However, time management isn’t the only issue that’s been keeping me from working on the Novel. The other big point goes to the heretofore cryptic title of this post.

I haven’t really made a secret of this, but I also haven’t come right out and said it: The Novel started off as the prose feature that I developed to add more content to the site for Cold Iron Badge, the webcomic I do with co-creator/artist extraordinaire Patrick Heinicke. (You can read it at www.coldironbadge.com) As such, it was set it the same world as the webcomic, but was a side-story with different characters. So far, so not-a-problem, right?

Originally, I thought that what is now the Novel would be a series of short stories. I thought they’d take place in the same city as Cold Iron Badge the webcomic (which I was being deliberately vague about anyway), and that the casts of the two stories would occasionally cross over, much as they do in the Law & Order spinoffs that were such an inspiration to me in creating Cold Iron Badge. That means that, among other things, they could share a villain.

In the course of writing, all of that changed. The hypothetical series of short stories became the Novel when I realized that I was telling a bigger story than I originally thought. The Novel now explicitly takes place in Toronto, while the webcomic is clearly set in Vancouver. So the characters in each will doubtless be aware of one another – they belong to the same organization – but they won’t cross paths as often as I thought at first. And the villain…

The webcomic has a Big Bad, a scary elf crime boss/sorcerer/swordsman named Nobody. I planned to use him as a menacing background figure in the short stories. But although I imagined that he’d frequently be the cause of problems that the characters in the prose stories had to deal with, I didn’t expect that he’d appear directly – or that there’d be an overarching Big Bad for the only loosely-related stories at all.

Then I realized that the Novel wasn’t the short stories, but the Novel. And I knew it would need a Big Bad. At first, I figured Nobody would still do the trick. He’s involved in a lot of villainous stuff and there’s no reason his plots couldn’t encompass both Vancouver and Toronto. And he’s a great character. But then, I started thinking about resolutions.

Specifically, and I apologize if this is way too obvious: If stories contain heroes and villains, as both the Novel and the Cold Iron Badge webcomic do, then there needs to be some sort of resolution around the conflict between them**. Equally importantly, the heroes and the villains need to be active, credible participants in the resolution***. We can’t have somebody else in a parallel story taking place offstage bust the villain when the heroes’ backs are turned. That’s called a deus ex machina, and it’s Very Bad Writing. So I can’t use the same villain in otherwise separate stories with separate characters and separate resolutions.

Not really an issue though, right? Nothing that can’t be solved with a little judicious rewriting. I already know who the new Big Bad for the novel is, and she, he or it**** is a doozy. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that I’m still serializing the story that has become the Novel on the Cold Iron Badge website.

It is, as noted above, about 25% done and people have, I presume and hope, been reading it. And that material includes Nobody mentioned as the Big Bad, explicitly. I can easily make a course correction, but I’ll be pulling aside the curtain and doing it overtly and explicitly for the readers. And I don’t want to go back and rewrite the material that’s already been posted; that’s the path of endless noodling madness where I get obsessed with fixing a story that isn’t even written yet and therefore, never finish it. So do I just abruptly change the story I’m writing with an awkward retroactive change to the continuity (what we geeks call a ret-con), and act as though the new Big Bad was the Big Bad all along? I can’t incorporate the changeover into the story as a plot point; eventually, the original villain is going to be rewritten out of ever having been there. I’d have to just abruptly switch villain-gears.

Figuring out what to do about this has been taking up a lot of the brainspace that should have been devoted to the actual writing, and it has to stop. I’ve finally decided on “awkward ret-con”, which will be… well, awkward. And embarrassing, because I hate showing my work. But them’s the breaks, I guess. I suppose I should have known going in that issues like this were potentially a part and parcel of writing a serialized longform story. But it’s frustrating! I don’t know how guys like Dickens managed it without losing their minds. Did he never think to himself part-way through, “Screw Oliver Twist. This is now a story about a cat who can shoot laser beams out of his eyes and fights crime!”*****

So, ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts; we’ve got a painfully obvious ret-con ahead and there’s going to be some bumpy reading. We apologize for any inconvenience.

 

--

 

* Hmm. What kind of story could have a character named ‘The Time Being’? Because now I really want to do that…

** Unless the lack of resolution is an important part of the story, of course.

*** Yeah yeah yeah, unless that’s an important part of the story.

**** That’s me being cagey. As cagey as I get, anyway.

***** ‘Laser Cat Versus The Time Being’. I’m not sure I want to write that story, but I do want to live in a world where that story exists.

 

A Bee What Now?

BHAG is one of those terms you pick up if you attend enough organizational or corporate strategic planning / missioning / visioning / consultants-using-buzzwords-to-justify-their-exorbitant-fees-ing kind of events – can you tell I’ve been to a few? It’s pronounced “Bee Hag” and it stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

It’s what it sounds like, basically: A clear, exciting and ambitious goal that motivates and inspires action.

As you can tell, I have my qualms about strategic planning / missioning / visioning / buzzwording – I’ve been part of good ones that inspired me and made me feel like part of a cohesive team, and I’ve part of bad, contentious ones that literally gave me nightmares – but I like the idea of the BHAG. Also, I’m a sucker for acronyms.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I am setting myself a BHAG.  

It’s Big, it’s Audacious, it’s certainly a Goal, and I expect things could get a bit Hairy.

As some of you know, I have this novel I’ve been working on – I’ve been serializing it more-or-less weekly at Cold Iron Badge as the ongoing prose story “All That Glitters”. It’s set in the same world as the comic, but is about different characters, and takes place in (explicitly) Toronto instead of (implicitly) Vancouver. Having a weekly deadline to meet has been great for my productivity, no doubt about it. But it also means that I’ve been writing on the fly a lot, following my characters around and watching them snark at one another. Which is, to be clear, something I enjoy greatly. But I’m at the stage where the central ideas of the story are becoming more clear, and where I need to take a step back and actually decide what I’m doing.

So, I’ve put the weekly installments on hiatus (replaced with another prose feature that may be even thrilling-er, but is easier and faster to write). And I’ve given myself a BHAG: To actually write this damn novel. In the month of May.

It’s a big goal because it involves a high volume of writing – all the material I’ve written to date for ‘All That Glitters’ amounts to about 15,000 words, and a novel needs to be 75- to 90,000. It’s audacious because, really, that’s a lot of writing to try to cram into a month on my schedule. It’s hairy because this is not the best time for me to be setting myself a big audacious goal; I haven’t been well over the past couple of weeks, and it’s not like I had a surplus of free time even before that.  

There are a lot of reasons this might not work, and I’m not necessarily anticipating success in my BHAGery. That is, I don’t know that I’ll be typing “The End” at 11:55 pm on May 31st. But the point of a Big Hairy Audacious Goal isn’t necessarily to achieve it, at least not in the short term. It’s to inspire and spur action. I’ve made good progress – really good, for me – taking the slow and steady approach with this project. But it’s time to try something different. It’s time to try fast and steady. The worst possible outcome is that I’ll be ahead of where I am now, so I have nothing to lose and rather a lot to gain.

Also, I have decided that there has to be a character in Cold Iron Badge called the Bee Hag. Has to be.

My Mind Is Like A Herd Of Cats

Choosing and prioritizing what I write has always posed a challenge for me, because I have (you’ve heard this one many times before, so say it with me) limited time to write, and often have multiple projects on the go.

But I’d recently seen some progress on that front. I’ve back-burned one of the novels I’ve been working on, and decided to make the other my priority. There’ll be some writing coming up for Cold Iron Badge, but it’s still a ways off. And I have some worldbuilding and background information that I want to develop and add to the Cold Iron Badge website, but that’ll be short and to the point. It’s not like it’s another novel to juggle.

I was actually down to one major, current project.

Then, of course, I had to keep thinking.

Stooping To Conquer

I had an idea for a short story that was nag-nag-nagging at my brain, demanding attention. I’ve read that this is the case with a lot of writers; many of us are epic procrastinators, and if we can’t find an excuse to not write, we can at least manage to obsess about writing something other than our current projects.

Finally, I realized that the best way to exorcise the thing was to stop fighting, give in and actually write it, since it is, by definition, short. It’s underway and I expect to be finished… well, shortly. And then I won’t have to think about it anymore, especially since I’m going to hand it off to the writers group and wait on revisions ‘til after I hear back from them.

Problem solved?

No, Problem Not Solved

Some little while ago, what with one thing and another, I was inspired to post this on Twitter:

Fools! Tremble before the might of Doctor Biohazard's Gyroscopic Transuranic Fully Automatic Piranha Cannon!

And now I want to write a %*#&ing steampunk novel…

Did I Really Used To Update This Thing Weekly?

Where the hell did I find the time?

Zzz + Owie = Zowie!

I'm tired and sore today.

Sore because I worked out on Monday night -- but not at the gym. Due to various adventures in scheduling, I had to pick my son up from daycare. So, I worked out after the kids were in bed; I climbed the stairs in the building, from the ground floor to the top. Twice. My legs are still sore, which, oddly, never happens to this extent when I use the stair climber at the gym. I can't quite figure out if that means I did something wrong, or something right. Oh, and I'm helping my sister-in-law move a 100-pound cat toy tonight, so wish me luck.

I'm tired because I spent Tuesday night at a creative meeting for a new project that a friend is getting off the ground. The details, I should probably keep under my hat for now, but it's a cool project involving lots of interesting, talented people and it promises to be a lot of fun. And, you know, given the opportunity to stay out later than I should talking shop with other writers...

So yes. Tired and sore, but both for good reason. 

Could I Have The Gain Without Pain? Please?

The Cold Iron Badge website was hacked last week -- just as we launched an advertising campaign, no less, although I don't know if that was coincidence or connection.

Our comic was replaced by a creepy, ghostly image of a guy who needs a shave, and text in English and what I think was Arabic crowing about how pathetic the security on our site was.

Um, yeah, dude, we're a rinky-dink little webcomic that runs on a blogging platform. Hacking into our site isn't exactly on par with convincing the launch system at the Pentagon that it's playing a game of chess with Professor Falken. But, you know, if it makes you feel good about yourself...

Actually, since the simplest solution was to have our web host wipe the site clean and start over, Patrick took the opportunity to do a redesign, and I must say, it really is new-and-improved and better-than-ever. There's another recent example of pain leading to gain (the pain in this case being Patrick's, as he did all the work). So thanks, creepy smug hacker guy!*

The disruption only lasted a couple of days, and doesn't seem to have cost us any readers, but we'd still appreciate your kind attention -- so if you haven't read Cold Iron Badge yet, or you need to get caught up, this would be a perfect time. Check us out at http://coldironbadge.com.

Ideas: Threat Or Menace?

I'm still having a hard time narrowing my focus down to one non-comics project, but I think that's coming. I've got a couple of short pieces that have been rattling around in my head, and it looks like the only way to make them stop will be to actually write the damn things. And I'd like to get ahead with 'All That Glitters' again, so that I have a few installments in the can and I'm not spending all my writing time chasing a self-imposed deadline. Not that it isn't good motivation, but I'd like to start playing a somewhat longer game, and actually get one of my Big Projects finished. Is that too ambitious? Yeah, probably, but time, and I, will tell.

Oh, and I’m experimenting with posting to the blog via email, and the last time I tried that, the formatting got really wonky. My apologies if it looks like I’ve inexplicably made the decision to add several dozen unnecessary line breaks to this update. Try to think of it as part of the adventure.  

--

*But please don't come back. We still hate you.

The Stories, So Far

It's been weeks since I've seen a "the year we make contact" joke. At the gym, the resolutionaries seem to be drifting away. The only New Year anyone is talking about is the Chinese one. 2010 is well and truly underway.

 

So it's not a bad time to take stock and evaluate the year to date.

 

Well, it’s been a busy year so far, but also one that’s off to better start than most of the past few years.

 

Things are going well at work, where the second anniversary of my hiring just went by. My family’s doing well; my children are learning and growing and thriving and doing more wonderful things than ever. I’ve been getting back to the gym, working on getting into shape again, and so far I’ve been able to stick with it.  

 

And on the writing front, although I haven’t been as productive as I’d like, I’ve been much more productive than I’ve been in previous years. I’m active in and enjoying my writers group, Cold Iron Badge is ongoing and I have several other projects on the go.

 

But they aren’t the projects that I would have expected to be working on, this time last year – or even a few months ago. I’ve recently changed the focus of my writing – or, perhaps, changed my goals to reflect the reality of my writing. This was the result of a good deal of soul-searching.

 

An existential crisis

 

Hmm. That sounds more Dostoevyskian than the situation actually warrants.

 

Regardless, I spent a lot of time -- over late last year, through resolution season -- thinking about how I want to move forward with my writing. About what I want to achieve, and how I want to achieve it.

 

I love comics, I love Cold Iron Badge and Xeno's Arrow, and they’re going to continue to be central to my writing.

 

But I don't see myself -- right now, with my interests, at this point in my life -- springboarding from those projects to other work in comics. (This is, of course, with all the usual caveats; if an interesting opportunity arises, I am certainly open to it).

 

Really, it's not like Marvel and DC were in a bidding war for my talents. This realization doesn't actually involve any changes to my approach.

 

No, the real shift has been on the other side of my writing: Screenplays.

 

I never had much traction as a screenwriter. I haven't had an agent in some time (which is a sordid and funny story that I probably shouldn't relate online) and never really had much success in professionalizing myself in the field.

 

My writing also doesn't really fit the needs of the Canadian market. The spec market for screenplays barely exists in Canada, and I like to write in classic, core genres that involve explosions and happy endings. I don't fit in with the art-housey, outsider-stancey attitude of Canadian feature film.

 

Grants? You can't get in the grant game here without credits, and you can't get credits writing the sort of movies I like to write.

 

And I've seen friends scramble and scrape, trying to make independent films here in the genres I do care about. But it takes years, and nobody gets paid, and the odds of getting your movie made, let alone finding distribution or achieving any kind of recognition, make roulette look like a sound investment strategy.

 

I'm pushing forty, and I have a family that needs me. I can't pick up stakes and move to LA on the chance of hitting in big. Hell, I don't even drive -- that alone means that I couldn’t cope with life in Los Angeles.

 

I could try writing for TV, because there is, at least for now, an English-language Canadian TV industry, and it's actually really good. Canadian TV is better than it's ever been, mirroring the new golden age of TV in the U.S..

 

But... I have no passion to write television, even in a golden age. To be honest, the thought of re-focusing on breaking in as a TV writer -- making contacts, writing a sample script for a hot show, trying to get a gig -- gives me the creeping horrors. I don't have the time or patience for it any more.

 

Screenwriting allowed me to learn a tremendous amount of craft and build my skills, and to meet some great people. But I've followed that path as far as I can. It's time to admit that it's not leading where I want to go.

 

So where does that leave me?

 

Insert your own pun based on the two meanings of "novel"

 

Yes. I'm writing a novel. I appear, a bit unexpectedly, to be writing several novels.

 

How did this happen?

 

Over the past year or so, I've been overcoming my fear of writing prose, which wasn't the only reason I was focused on scripts, but certainly played a part.

 

At the suggestion of my dear friend and former writing partner Nicole, I'm working on adapting a screenplay into a novel. It's an interesting process, and a reversal of the usual one; novels are often adapted for the screen, but it’s tricky to do well because they tend to be so dense; you have to leave a great deal of the complexity out, and sometimes that complexity is what makes the story work.

 

What I’m doing now is a different challenge; I'm embroidering, trying to turn a 100-page (with lots of white space on the pages) story into a much denser, more involved narrative. Essentially, I'm treating my screenplay as a fairly detailed outline for the novel, and adding to it. I've only just begun. If the process is interesting, I may discuss it further.

 

Plus, as some of you already know, I've been writing and posting a weekly prose story at the Cold Iron Badge website. It's not about the narrative or the characters featured in the comic. I thought that a side-story about two other members of the Borderland Guard would be interesting, fun and could also include some world-building details that I couldn't fit into the main feature. My first attempt was a short story; my second, which I'm still working on, is called All That Glitters, and it seems to be turning into something rather longer. It might indeed be a novel when it's done. I guess I'll have to see where the journey takes me. In the mean time, I'm having a lot of fun with the narrator and her adventures.

 

And I have another project on my mind. It's been on the back-burner, but the chunk of it that I've actually had written and sitting around for a while was sufficiently well-received that I'm really tempted to move it up the To-Do list.

 

The problem with being so rich in projects is that I have a limited amount of time to write and I really don’t like constantly switching gears, trying to get from the narrative, tone and character voices of one story to another. So I’m trying to prioritize, to set goals and stick to them.

 

And then there’s the question of professionalizing myself as a novelist, as I was never quite able to do with screenwriting. Finding an agent. Getting manuscripts out to publishers. Eventually, of course, the goal, the hope and dream: Selling a novel.

 

All of that is another part of the process, and it’s something I intend to chronicle here. After my year-long time away from blogging, I hope to begin posting here more regularly. We’ll see how that plan goes (see “limited amount of time to write”, above). We’ll see how all my plans go.

 

For now, though, and on balance, I’m off to a decent start.

 

So far, it’s a good year.

 

A Taste of Xeno's Arrow

It occurs to me that I've talked up Cold Iron Badge here, but not so much my first comics-baby, Xeno's Arrow. That should be remedied, and since I an image online with an easy-to-use link anyway, I thought this would be an opportune moment to provide a little taste...

Xeno's Arrow is the story of Xeno, a young alien boy of mysterious origins who has spent his whole life in an Intergalactic Zoo run by Lizards who makes the pivotal decision to escape and seek freedom and adventure... but finds that nothing in the universe is quite what he expected...

Once upon a time, in the Known Galaxy...

You'll Have To Excuse Me, I'm Not At My Best...

And I really do feel like I've been gone for a month, albeit metaphorically. Missed out on the drunk part, though. What I do have is a cold.

But even before the cold bit me -- and I knew it was coming, since the rest of the family were already feeling it -- it had been a frustrating week, wrapping up a frustrating month.

I've been tired and unfocused, and the cold weather has me feeling down. It's been hard to write. It's been hard to eat well or get to the gym, either (I don't think I've made it to the gym since the new year) and I feel like I've lost a lot of ground on that front. Which is ironic, because I managed to get through the holidays without putting any weight back on, only to trip up during Resolution Season.

Sigh.

But tomorrow is another day. There's a new week and a new month coming up. They'll be better than this one.

The plus side is that I'm way too busy, and have way too many projects to juggle, to waste time on self-recrimination. Onward!

Bachelor of Erstwhile

I've been at my current job for a little under a year; I started on February 11th, 2008. As many of you already know, I work for the University of Toronto. For a variety of reasons, I love my job. I work in a small, congenial office with great people. My work involves all sorts of interesting projects and initiatives, and unlike some admin jobs that I or friends have suffered through, mine is for an organization that actually benefits humanity.

Another reason that I love my job is that universities, by their nature, are supportive of education and life-long learning.

When I studied Theatre at York University, there were a lot of courses outside of (and even inside) the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Theatre Department that I couldn't take, despite being interested in them, because of scheduling conflicts and the like. And many of the courses I did take had a more practical than traditionally academic flavour (although I was the only Theatre major I knew who took a Political Science course for fun.)

So I always felt like I'd missed out on some opportunities to expand my horizons, think more deeply, really get into the university experience, and read the books you should read to be culturally literate but only actually do read when they're going to be on the final exam (I'm looking at you, James Joyce!)

Which was a pity, but so it goes. I figured that academia was behind me. It wasn't as though I had the time, or especially the money, to go back to school

And this brings me to the other opportunity to get back from erstwhile that I've been mentioning. One particularly amazing perk of being an employee of the University is that I can essentially get a degree for free. More than one -- I can pursue a course of study up to the Master's level.

There are some reasonable limits, of course. The benefit covers the equivalent of a general arts degree; if a program had additional fees, I'd be on the hook for them. It only covers a part-time course load, which is about the most I'd try to schedule around work, writing and my family anyway. And, big as U. of T. is, it doesn't cover every possible field of study, certainly not at the downtown campus where I work and where it makes sense for me to take courses.

But those are trivial issues. This is, as I said, a really freaking amazing opportunity. It would be ridiculous not to take advantage of it.

The problem is, I can't decide how to proceed. There are so many amazing possibilities, I'm not sure what field of study to pursue.

So, in addition to my own thinking on the subject, I thought I'd take this to you, my illustrious peanut gallery. You know me. Or you know me well enough to have a sense of some of my skills, strengths and interests. Or you don't know me at all, which will at the very least liven up the discussion, so don't let that hold you back.

I ask you: What sort of degree should I go for?

I'm going to share some of my thoughts, then open up the floor to you for comments and suggestions.

English
Books. Lots and lots of books. This strikes me as a great excuse to get caught up on some of the canon that I missed out on due to the specialized nature of my earlier studies. This would be a degree, then, pursued purely for personal enrichment, not to advance any particular goals re: my career. U. of T., like many universities, now has courses in genre fiction and graphic novels in the English department. That would be interesting, and I'd be curious to see how my practical experience in the field meshed with an academic take on the subject. I've also thought about using this, along with some Art courses, to sort of invent a degree in comics for myself.

Cinema Studies
A degree that requires watching a lot of movies is about as awesome as one that requires reading a lot of books. Cinema Studies at U. of T. is an academic program, so it's not really "film school". Which is good, because I have an aversion to guys who wear their baseball caps backwards because that's how Spielberg does it. The program would focus on analysis, which does interest me, and which I'm good at. I figure at the very least, I'd emerge being able to use the phrase "mise-en-scene" correctly in a sentence, which would be a net gain.

History
I love history. A lot of my pleasure reading is non-fiction, focusing on history. An undergraduate History degree could lead to the Medieval Studies program, which strikes me as extremely cool. Because I am a huge geek. Regardless, an opportunity to learn Middle English is not to be casually tossed aside.

Something Else?
So what do you think. Is there a possibility that I haven't considered? Something that's a natural fit for me that I haven't mentioned? Let me know, in a comment below or by email!

Whew. That's what's on my mind right now. But next time out, I think I'll actually talk about writing again...

On Privacy and "Business Casual" Blogging

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

I first read that in Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel Microserfs -- one of my favourite novels, by the way. I don't think Coupland made it up; one of his characters uses the phrase as though it was already a generally-understood truism. And was in 1995, when people still talked about the capital-I Internet and used the phrase "information superhighway" only a little bit self-consciously.

In other words, being online and secret identities go back a long way.

There are many good reasons to post online anonymously, or using a pseudonym. One of those advantages is that it makes it possible to share things with the entire world, without the entire world knowing that you are actually you. You can blow the whistle on something dangerous or illegal, vent about something without getting into trouble, ask for help about something that's embarrassing or really sensitive, something you might be judged or attacked for.

Online anonymity, in other words, does not exist solely to facilitate spamming, or so that dolts can safely insult one another's opinions about Spider-man, or to allow teenagers to get away with posting videos about setting their sister's hamster on fire. It has real and valuable benefits.

However, anonymity cuts both ways. Another advantage of the the Internet is supposed to be how easy it is to reach large numbers of people all over the world -- but that can be hard to do under a pseudonym, unless what you're promoting is your pseudonym.

Which is all very well if you want to increase the profile of an online persona called Number1HarryPotterFan4EVAR, but problematic if you want to tie what you do online to something you do in analog.

What I'm getting at here, is simply this: Most of what I do online, I do under my real name. Including this blog, which is public and which is one of the top 20 or 30 returns when you do a Google search on me.

This is complicated further by the fact that I have the blessing and curse of not being named John Smith. There are one or two people who come close with variant spellings, but as far as I can tell, I'm the only Stephen Geigen-Miller in the world.

Which makes it very, very easy to be certain which Stephen Geigen-Miller you're reading about.

I know for a fact that my current employers Googled me before I got hired; my wife Googled me before our first date.

So: Everything I do online impacts on my offline life. And it also impacts on everything else I say and do online -- including endeavours that I share with other people, like Greg for Xeno's Arrow and Patrick for Cold Iron Badge. Besides being careful about the impression I make of myself, I also have to think about how what I say and do will reflect on my work and my creative partners.

This means that, in a very real way, whenever I'm posting online, I'm at work. It's a pretty friendly, casual work environment, to be sure -- but it's still the office. It's public, not private. and there are some things that it is not appropriate to discuss in public, or at the office.

(This may just be my WASPy, suburban upbringing talking, but it's how I feel.)

These things include, as far as I'm concerned, finances, my sex life, things that would violate someone else's privacy, and beyond a certain point, personal health issues.

I am comfortable with disclosing, in this casual office we share, if I've been sick, particularly if that affects any of my de-erstwhiling processes. I'm comfortable with talking about how I'm trying to eat better, get to the gym more and lose weight. It's a tough slog, and a sometimes depressing, frustrating and even scary process, and I need to talk about it and ask for support in order to get back to the way I want my life to be.

But that's about as far as I'm willing to go. I have limits regarding how detailed and specific I'm going to get, and that's where my personal definition of crossing the line between "business casual" and "icky personal health issues" lies.

And just to be clear: This is a choice I make that is for and about me, nobody else. Other people can and should go into as much detail about their lives as they want to. I follow some blogs -- some of which are under the authors's real names! -- that share very personal information, about health, relationships, and/or sexuality.

And just to be absolutely painfully crystal-clear, I'm also not upset or offended that anyone cares enough to want to know more about what's going on in my life. That's wonderful, and you are very sweet. But let's have that conversation when I'm not at work, okay?

Now that that's been dealt with, there's still the matter I alluded to in my previous post, the other not-writing, not-the-gym back-from-erstwhiling I wanted to discuss. More on that next time.

The Shape of Blogs to Come

Well, I haven't been doing much flying so far. It's been a hard week to get on top of -- I just can't seem to get my head in gear.

I've been tired, and out of sorts, and not writing much and not getting the gym and eating too much crappy food.

But you know: Meh. The week is almost over, and then it's on to a new one.

I've had one minor triumph: I field-tested my new notebook computer, which I have named Trogdor, after the internet's most burninating dragon.

I've been taking Trogdor to work with me, and yesterday I sat down in the cafeteria -- the busiest I've seen it for months, full of university students -- and tried it out.

And yeah, overall, things went well. I'm still adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of the keyboard, which is obviously more compressed than that of a regular desktop or even a laptop computer. But that's going to be relatively straightforward. The battery seems to hold up, and by the end of the hour I was making fewer typos than when I started.

With all the noise, I figured my best bet was to try writing something that didn't involve too much intricate plotting or having to hear idiosyncratic character voices in my head -- so, no finishing Chapter 3 of Cold Iron Badge or starting a new draft of the screenplay.

That will come, but I think I'm going to have to start taking my lunch later. Chuck Palahniuk is apparently a great advocate of writing in hospital emergency rooms, but I need to have a little more peace and quiet.

So I tried writing an Erstwhile post. Not this one; because I don't have wireless internet access, and didn't actually remember to buy a USB flash drive when I bought Trogdor, I currently have no way to get my writing from Trogdor to the desktop at home, which I can use to, you know, actually post here.

I'll remedy that goof-up before the weekend's out. Until then, I'm sort of writing a new post now and sort of trying to reconstruct what I wrote before while sort of also updating it because it's not something I'm doing live anymore, but something I did yesterday.

Regardless, what I was getting at yesterday, and what I'm getting to now, is this: In my bold announcement last week, of my bold return to bold blogging... I neglected to boldly, or even cravenly, address the question I raised in my post previous to that, about five months back.

Namely, what this blog is for now, if I'm kind of back from erstwhile.

And yesterday I came up with a couple of answers to that.

First of all, and let's be honest here, I really am only "kind of" back from erstwhile. Cold Iron Badge is going extremely well, and Patrick is getting better all the time. I'm active in the writers group and I'm excited about the feedback I've been getting there on my screenplays; I think the next drafts will really take them to a new level.

But there's a lot to be done, too. Getting more readers and recognition for Cold Iron Badge and Xeno's Arrow, and monetizing them as well. Getting an agent, so that my screenplays can go to market.

Essentially, I want to not just be a writer, nor even a professional writer, but a paid professional writer. I know that's mercenary, but you know, I'm comfortable with being mercenary. I'd like to be paid for my work.

And I think that will be an interesting, blog-worthy process, and one that I'd like to put out there (as long as I'm careful not to use the real names of people and organizations when things are "in development".)

But also, writing isn't the only part of my life where I need to de-erstwhile.

Over the past few months, I've started trying to get to the gym regularly again, and eat better. Or at least, eat with more restraint. I was doing pretty well up until the holidays and my weird post-holiday snacking binge this week -- well enough that I was starting to see the beginnings of results.

Frankly, this is a process where I could really use some support. Again, I'll be circumspect about details at the ickier end of the spectrum, but it'll help me a lot to know someone's in my corner.

And there's another area of my life where I can get back from being an erstwhile -- an opportunity to re-open a closed chapter. But I'll save that for next time -- it's worth a blog post of its own.

New Year's Revolutions

Hello and happy New Year!

I've been away from here, but I have been blogging -- at the Cold Iron Blog, where my Cold Iron Badge co-creator Patrick and I talk about the origins, process and future of CIB.

You can also follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook, both of which I've been updating rather more frequently than this space.

Other than the Cold Iron Blog, though, I haven't been writing much over the past few months; my head has been in other spaces, and there's always the issue of time. Not of finding it, so much as managing it. But with the recent holidays, I've upgraded my tools in a way that I think will help a great deal -- my Christmas present from me and the family to myself was a netbook, one of the new generation of really small, light, efficient laptops. It weighs about a kilogram, and the battery works like a dream, so I can really take it anywhere. Now I can write with ease on my lunch hour at work, for instance.

The ghosts of Shakespeare and Robertson Davies are laughing at me. "You don't actually need a computer to write, you know," they're saying. "Or have you not heard of the bleeding-edge technologies that we call a pen and paper?"

Supercilious dead bastards.

The fact is, there are things that it is easier for me to write on a computer. Longhand is all very well for jotting down stray thoughts, or for outlines, ideas and character sketches -- things that involve me crystallizing my thoughts on paper. But for the actual writing, the things that other people are actually going to read, I just find it easier, faster, more efficient and more fluid to use a computer.

I'm going to push myself to write for at least an hour every day, more if I can make the time after the kids are in bed. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's much more than I'm managing now, and I think it'll make a huge difference.


Because, after a long period of erstwhiling, and then a long process of de-erstwhiling by fits and starts, I feel like now is the time to really push forward.

There's so much I want to do. A couple of my screenplays have gone through the critiquing process in the Writers Group, and it's time for new drafts that'll polish them up. There's lots of exciting stuff coming up in Cold Iron Badge. Greg and I have been talking about launching a new Xeno's Arrow website, building our readership, and eventually merchandising and creating new material.

It's an exciting time, an exciting place to be in.

There was a lot of pain for me last year, but a lot of good, too -- my new job at the University and the launch of Cold Iron Badge were two big ones. I've been describing 2008 as the year I stopped falling.

That means that 2009 is the year to fly.