finished revising Sons of the Crow and passed it to the beta readers
hammered out 3000 words of a book I am contracted to write
did a 2500-words translation (still need to revise it)
outlined an article I’m sending to a magazine on Monday
posted a cover reveal for my patrons (will go up in two hours at the time of writing)
Then I ask myself why I so often feel depressed on the weekend. Ah! Because yes, I should be proud of the work done, but really, it sometimes feels like there is no difference – week day, weekend, summer, winter, day, night…
So, I’m calling it a day. Today for the first time this year I was able to take a long walk during lunchtime, and it’s fine. Now I will dedicate the rest of this day to decompressing. And, also, to jot down a few ideas for two stories I’d like to submit to two magazines this month. But, you know, at a leisurely pace.
Book pre-orders – I love them. It’s one of the perks of following a writer: you sometimes get the chance to pre-order their books, maybe save a few bucks, and you feel sort of special. For a lot of strange reasons pre-orders are not that popular in my country, and whenever I tried to set-up a pre-order for my books the results were underwhelming. But as a reader, provided I’ve the money on my credit card, tell me where I need to sign.
Case in point, Rayne Hall’s latest writer-oriented handbook. I have half a dozen of her previous handbooks, and they are great: short, focused and to the point, very practical, very savvy, fun to read and useful. When I got the opportunity of pre-ordering Author Branding, I just clicked on the button. Now it’s here, and I have spent some time before dinner to dig in, and then changed my schedule for the rest of the evening: editing can wait, I want to read this baby to the end.
Back when I was still working as a researcher in university, I was asked once how I managed to “reconcile” my research papers with the science fiction, fantasy and horror stories I was publishing at the time. My reply being, of course, that I credited my readers with the modicum amount of intelligence needed to tell the difference between a paper on Miocene rocks and a story about a guy working part-time as a vampire hunter.
I also added that, if it is perfectly fine for a geologist to do research and then play piano in a jazz band or cook for his friends on the weekend, why should it be different were he a storyteller instead of a pianist or a barbecue maverick?
On the other hand, I guess some of the reading I’ve done recently for research purposes might really get me in trouble with my (now former) colleagues. It’s all about the Younger Dryas cold spell, and it makes for both fascinating science and great storytelling.
When I was a kid, writing stories on my mother’s Olivetti typewriter, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I was fascinated by the folklore of the Golden Age of science fiction, the stories of writers that were also characters and, to a kid living in the shadow of the smokestacks in the outskirts of an industrial town, a sort of heroes. I think this is part of a process a lot of writers go through – when you begin, you want to tell stories, yes, but you also want to be like… ah, like Fritz Leiber or Michael Moorcock, in my case, like Jack Williamson or Tanith Lee.
Later it sort of goes away. Your pantheon of gods and heroes expands, and telling stories, being read, becomes the primary force. Some shift to other purposes – fame, fortune, being interviewed on television, being popular. Often they are people that do not like to write, and do not have stories to tell – they just seek the lifestyle.
I found out yesterday that I am a horror writer or a game writer. These are the two tags that get attached to my name – so much so that I do not normally appear in surveys of fantasy or science fiction writers in my country. But there’s books out there in which I am listed as horror or weird writer, and two weeks ago I was dismissed with a shrug “Ah, yes, you’re a game writer” (implying I do not do Art).
One day I will write a story. It will be called Still my favorite song, that is a quote from a song by Burt Bacharach, called It was you. I often use old songs to find a title for my stories and my works. My weird western gaming supplement for Deadlands is called Messico & Nuvole, and that’s the title of a song. All the Hope & Glory novellas have a title based on a record or a song, and Hope & Glory itself references Edward Elgar, of course.
One day I will write Still my favorite song, that is a story about a guy that after thirty years still has dreams in which he meets his first love. I could quote Donald Fagen’s The Goodbye Look, given the premise, and call the story An old lover dressed in grey, but Bacharach is more fitting. Fagen is too cynical.
In the story, whenever this guy is going through a rough patch in his life, he gets these dreams, and finds himself in a deserted city, a stark black and white city in a sort of Norman Bel Geddes modernist style, and there he meets his old flame, and they spend some time together, exploring the empty city, and talking. Then he wakes up, and he has only a sketchy memory of what they did, where they went, what they found out, what they discovered. But it feels good.
The dream thing goes on for a few nights, then the affairs in his real life get better, and the dreams are gone, only to return, months or even years later, when something goes wrong in his life again.
This goes on for thirty years. Then one day they meet in real life. She’s happy, she has her own life and everything. They have a cup of tea and a talk, like good old friends would. And talking together, they find out they have been dreaming the same city. They saw the same landmarks, went to the same places, and she has been meeting him there just as he met her.
I don’t know what will happen from that point on, in my story. I want to write it to find it out.
One day or another I will write Still my favorite song. Not right now, but I will, I know I will. After all, don’t they tell us we should write based on our own experiences?
Not necessarily the 10cc song of the same title, but maybe… who knows? I stumbled today on a discussion in which one of the individuals involved claimed genre fiction can’t be as good as literary fiction, because if it’s good it can’t be genre fiction. I oversimplify, but that was basically the gist of the argument, with a twist – genre writing can’t be good because of the way in which it is produced, because of the authorial intent, if you will.
Now the obvious implication of this reasoning is, the moment I sit here and I say to myself , for instance,
now I’ll write me a ghost story
my story automatically looses the opportunity of being good, in a “literary fiction” sort of good. It’s flawed simply because I decided upon a certain form, and contents, that can be slotted into a genre. Mind you, it still exists the odd possibility that the story will turn out so good it will actually be literature, but it’s highly unlikely, and should it happen, it will be despite my intentions.
Reader, I did it! About two hours ago – at the time of publishing this – I sent a short story of mine to a literary magazine, my first literary fiction submission ever. Mainstream as hell, no flashing swords, no roaring rockets, no snarky adventurers in this one. Serious fiction, yessir. There goes my pulp street cred.
The venue to which I have submitted my piece is so classy and literary and posh that they don’t pay the stories they publish, but in exposure – but I was happy to break my rule, never to give away my work for free, because, first, it was a 330-words piece that I wrote in thirty minutes (and edited in two hours, more about that later), second, I considered more a writing exercise than work, and third, because it is a story I want somebody to publish.
Karavansara 