why we write – Page 3 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

3am thoughts, or why everyone says to be an accountant (Blast from the Past: October 2013)

A lot of my blog posts this week had to do with money, wealth, and politics, so when I was searching for an old post to bring back, this one made me stop and reflect for a while.

My opinions and perspective have changed a bit since I wrote it, but the fundamental message is still one that I agree with. I’ve trimmed out some of the parts where I think I was wrong, and left the stuff that still resonates. Hopefully it resonates with you as well. Either way, feel free to let me know.

I’ve been reading in bed on my smart phone recently, which is probably a bad idea because it makes it harder to go asleep. At the same time, it tends to get my mind rolling, and at 3am my thoughts tend to go some really interesting places. Sharing those thoughts is probably going to get me into trouble, but hey, you might find them interesting, so why not?

When I was eight years old, I knew I was going to be a writer. There was never any question about that. I spent all my free time making up stories. However, I knew I never wanted writing to be my job, because 1) everyone hates their jobs, and 2) everyone knows that writers can’t make a decent living. Even at eight years old, I had bought into some of society’s most pervasive myths about jobs, careers, and how to make money.

Americans are generally horrible with money. We struggle to keep budgets and put all sorts of things on credit, and pay more than twice what our houses are worth by signing mortgages we barely even read. Because we’re so horrible with money, we tend to see it as a magical force, something that can solve all our problems and make us happy. Rich people are like wizards or sorcerers, so far above the rest of us that we can hardly fathom their ways.

Nowhere is this stupidity more apparent than in the fact that most of us spend our lives working for some sort of hourly or salaried wage. Wages and salaries are basically the same, in that they convert time into money. That’s why we all measure income in terms of dollars per hour, or salary per year. But for anyone who understands how money works, that is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Money comes and goes, but time? Time is one of the most finite and precious resources known to man.

All of us are going to die someday. Most people are scared shitless by that fact, so we try to ignore it or put off thinking about it until we have to. But not all of us get the opportunity to put our affairs in order before we die. And even if we do all live to be centenarians, our time on this Earth is still finite. It’s non-renewable, too—you can’t go back and relive that day or that hour or that minute once it’s passed.

Converting time into money is basically trading gold for lead, or wine for water. Yet that’s exactly what we do, because money is this strange, magical force that so few of us understand.

Questions like “where do you work?” “what is your job?” and “what do you make?” are much more common than “what do you do for a living?” That’s because most of us have bought into this idea that money comes from working for someone else. While we’re on the clock, the company owns us and anything we produce. That’s the pact we make in exchange for this magical substance we call money.

It wasn’t until college that I started to become disabused of my childhood notions about writing for a living. First, I came to realize that lots of people love their work—that just because you do something as a job doesn’t mean that you’ll come to hate it. But it wasn’t until I graduated unemployed in the middle of a recession that I was disabused of the notion that writers can’t make a living.

People say that about every career—that is, every career except accounting. That’s because accountants are the ones who count the magical money. They’re the ones who know where it comes from. Their jobs are the ones that the people with the magical money will always need.

But there are other ways to make money—thousands of ways. Millions, even. It’s not about time it’s about producing something that people want and need. But when you’re working for yourself, that’s hard. You have to own up to your work—the failures as well as the successes.

When you work for a corporation, it’s easy to shift the blame. It’s a rare case where one person is solely responsible for bringing down the whole collective enterprise. But when you work for yourself, you can’t blame anyone else when things go wrong. You’ve got to take the risk.

That’s why everyone says that you can’t make a living as a writer. They say the same thing about any career where you strike out on your own.

In the end, though, it’s all just silly. Money isn’t a vague magical force—it comes from the value you create. It comes from producing something that people are willing to pay you for. And you don’t need to sell your time at $11 an hour or $44,000 a year to do that. You just need hard work, a great idea, and the ability to learn from your mistakes.

So can you make a living pursuing your dreams? The answer to that question depends entirely on you.

What it’s like to write after a life interruption

Stage 0: Procrastination

I guess I should write… but first, I should check my email. Also, there’s a couple of publishing tasks I need to do. I’m also kind of hungry, come to think of it.

Wow, those publishing tasks took a lot longer than I thought they would. I could start writing now, but I’d only have half an hour, and what can I possibly get done in that time? Maybe I should just relax for a bit and play this addictive online game…

Stage 1: BIC HOC

All right, no more excuses. It’s butt in chair, hands on keyboard time!

What’s wrong with my chair? Did someone put a magnet in it? It seems like my butt gets repulsed every time I try to sit down in it. I can knock off a couple of paragraphs, but then I have to get up and pace for a while. Or do some chores. Or—

No! I’ve got to focus. But man, it feels like I’m pulling teeth. The words just aren’t coming. It’s been more than an hour, and how much have I written? Holy crap, that’s pathetic.

Well, it’s the end of the day, and I only managed a few hundred words, but that’s better than nothing I guess.

Stage 2: Progress

Is something different? It still feels like I’m pulling teeth, but my writing time is only half over and I’ve already passed a thousand words. Also, that last scene was kind of awesome. I could probably improve it in the next pass, but it turned out better than I thought it would.

I’m still way behind from where I need to be, and I have no idea if I’ll ever make my deadline, but I’m slowly making progress. Not bad. Let’s lie down for a while or go for a long walk and think about what happens next. This is actually turning out to be a pretty good story.

Stage 3: Acceleration

It’s getting late and I really should be doing other things, but I’ve got a great idea for this next scene and I just have to write it.

What’s that? My emails are piling up, and my to do list of publishing tasks has been neglected? Yeah, yeah, I’ll get around to that, but first I really have to knock out this scene. And what if I changed this one three chapters ago to foreshadow it? Then I would also have to change how that one character reacted when the big reveal happened on page 128, and…

Wow, that was incredibly invigorating! I feel like I’m reading this story for the first time. The words are really flying, but that actually doesn’t matter because this next chapter is the big one and I’ve got to focus on that. No time to count how many words I’ve written!

Stage 4: Peak Creativity

I can’t wait to wake up in the morning because the next chapter is going to be totally awesome. I spent my whole shift at the day job thinking about it, and it’s really going to tie the plot and thematic elements together.

What is this character thinking right now? What is it like to be in her shoes? Does this other character have any idea what she’s feeling right now? Is he too caught up in his own concerns? Where did those concerns come from? Obviously, they came from the difficulties in his childhood. Let’s take a few moments to work that out. What’s the story behind how this character came to be who he is today, and how does that impact everything else in the book?

All right, time to take a quick break and refill the creative well. What’s this? A mountainous stack of emails and publishing tasks? Let’s chip away at it for a while, and maybe write a blog post while we’re at it.

Enough for now. Back to writing!

Life Interruption

Oh crap. Time to go back to stage 0 again.

Heaven’s Library (Blast from the Past: June 2009)

All right, it’s time to get in the wayback machine and revisit a post from long ago. This one should be especially interesting to you aspiring writers out there, as well as the seasoned writers who need an extra gut-wrenching wake-up call from time to time. I know I certainly do.

Today was the first day of BYU’s writing conference, and it was great! The speaker in the last workshop, Dandi Mackall, was exceptional. I don’t have my notes with me and the BYU library closes in twenty minutes, so I’ll recap the best part of her presentation.

She said that once she had a dream where she died and went to heaven (thank goodness!). When she got there, the angel who greeted her offered to show her around, and asked what she wanted to see first. Her answer? The library, of course!

In heaven’s library, she found shelves stretching as far as she could see, full of the very best books. She picked out a few and recognized some of her favorites, the ones that had impacted and changed her life.

After a while, though, she started to get a little disappointed: all of the books in heaven’s library were books we already had down on Earth. Why was that? Didn’t heaven have anything new–anything we hadn’t already seen down below?

“But all these books were here first,” said the angel.

Still, she couldn’t accept that as an answer, so the angel took her down a long, winding, narrow corridor. The deeper she went, the narrower and dustier it became, until she started to feel uneasily. This part of the library was dark and dirty. It was clear that hardly anybody every came down here.

Finally, the angel led her to a door covered in cobwebs. He brushed them aside and opened the door. Here was a room many times larger than the first, with old, dusty bookshelves stretching out of sight.

She picked out a book and started reading through it. It was one she’d never heard of, but it grabbed her. She could tell that it was really good. She picked up another one, and realized that it was just the kind of book that one of her friends would have loved. She picked up another one, and realized that this one could have helped out another friend through a terrible crisis she’d recently been through.

“Why didn’t we have these books?” she angrily asked the angel. “They are just as good as the other ones. Why didn’t they make it down?”

“These are all the books that remain unwritten,” the angel answered. “Each one of these is a book that a writer, somewhere below, has in them but fails to write down.

“This one is by a writer who won’t let anyone give her the criticism she needs to improve her craft. This one is by a writer who doesn’t have the discipline to finish what he starts. This one is by a writer who doubts herself and doesn’t think she can ever get her story to work.”

Humbled, she followed the angel back to the main hall. Just before stepping through the doors, she saw one last book. The name on the cover was her own.

For some reason I don’t understand, fate, God, or genetics (or some malicious combination of the three) conspired to turn me into a writer. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m making a mistake trying to turn this passion into something that will feed myself and my future family. Looking at the millions of other writers like myself, it’s easy to feel anxious. Only a tiny fraction of us will ever make a professional career out of this. Do I even have a chance?

But then I hear a story like this one and I remember why it is that I write. Not for fame, fortune, publication, personal gratification, or even just because I can’t not do it. It’s because storytelling itself is important. It helps us connect with the world around us, to see its beauty and wonder. It helps us to appreciate ourselves and understand others. It stimulates our imaginations and lifts our eyes to see the divine potential that is all around us. It helps us to grow and to heal—to live and to love.

May you find your book in heaven’s library and bring it into the world!

The Gulf Between the Generations (Blast from the Past: February 2012)

Here’s a post I originally wrote in 2012. Given how most political commentary tends to lose relevance over time, it’s remarkable when something from the past is even more relevant now than when it was written.

Not that this post is overly political: more just a series of observations, including some red flags that, at the time, were still on the distant horizon. In recent months, those flags have drawn much closer.

Such a crazy world we live in. Stay safe, and thanks for reading.

I just watched a fascinating interview with a 1960s White House intern who claimed to have an eighteen month affair with President John F. Kennedy. But the most interesting thing wasn’t the affair itself, but the way the President’s staff, the “fourth branch” of government (AKA the media), and the entire general public of 1960s America seemed more intent on keeping the secret than on facing the truth about JFK’s many affairs.

It seems that my parents’ generation had so much trust in their government that nobody would even raise the question—that to raise doubts about the integrity of the man who held the highest office in this country would itself be unconscionable. Rather than face the facts, the American public seemed unwilling to do anything that would shatter the gilded image of the man who led the free world. And that, quite frankly, is a mindset that I simply cannot understand.

In contrast, my own generation has very little trust in our government. We’ve been raised in an age of ambiguity, where the enemy doesn’t wear a uniform or pledge allegiance to a flag, but live quietly among us, until they strap a bomb to their bodies or turn a commercial airplane into a weapon of terror. Or at least, that’s the excuse our government gives us for an increasingly invasive security regime that infringes on our basic liberties, enables the military to hold us in detention indefinitely, and sends our soldiers overseas to fight increasingly senseless wars to “liberate” the people of oil-rich nations who don’t even want us there. As if that weren’t enough, the economic crash has taught us that all that stuff our parents taught us about equality and opportunity is really just a pack of lies—that the rich get bailouts while the rest of us foot the bill, and all that stuff about changing the world and being whatever you want to be… yeah. Lies, all of it.

My Dad had an interesting rebuttal to all this, though. He said that it wasn’t his generation that put the president on a pedestal—it was his generation that tore the pedestal down. During the 60s and 70s, the Vietnam era and the rise of the hippy movement, his generation fought back and made it acceptable for us to question the president, or to criticize the government, or to do all the things that we take for granted today. In fact, he said that we’re the ones who are backsliding into complacency, with our deafening echo chambers, our social media inanities, our reactive attachment to corporate brands and advertising, and our almost religious sense of entitlement.

I’m not totally convinced he’s right, but I do think there’s a fundamental gulf between these three generations. Our grandparents’ was the silent generation, where people were expected to keep to their own business and not rock the boat. Our parents’ generation was one of top-down media, where ABC, NBC, and CBS ruled the airwaves and told us all what to think, buy, and believe. Ours is a much more peer-to-peer generation, but I worry that we’re turning into a collection of mindless herds who are turning the culture wars into a messy riot where we abandon civil dialog and rational thinking for a much more destructive mob mentality that isn’t really building anything, but tearing it all down.

Sometimes, it gets so frustrating that it makes me yearn for the days of the frontier, when you could leave it all behind and reinvent yourself somewhere out in the west. That’s probably why I’m so drawn to science fiction, where space is the final frontier. There really are times when I wish I could go to the stars and escape to it all. Writing about that is the next best thing.

Maybe that’s why I feel so compelled to write Star Wanderers. It’s not all rosy, of course—space can be a cold, dark, and lonely place—but so can this world, when you’re lost and you don’t really know what you’re doing with your life.

I don’t know if I recognize anywhere as my own country anymore. Like Van Gogh, all I can say is the sight of the stars makes me dream.

A political rant

There is no meaningful difference between Clinton and Trump.

Both are narcissists.

Both are habitual liars.

Both are corrupt.

Both have a tendency to blame others for their failures instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.

Both treat the people underneath them poorly or with outright contempt.

Both think they are above the law, and seek to use the law to put down those who stand in their way.

Both are masters of saying what their audience wants to hear without saying anything of actual substance.

Both have flip-flopped 180 degrees on major national issues.

Both want to accelerate the same fiscal irresponsibility that got us into the Great Recession and prolonged it for so long.

Both are perfectly willing to order the military to do things that violate their sacred oath to defend the Constitution.

Both believe in an authoritarian government that violates constitutional principles and the basic rule of law.

I cannot, in good conscience, vote for either of them.

My greatest political fear is that our Republic is about to be overthrown and transformed into an Empire. We have a system of checks and balances to prevent that from taking place, but that system has been steadily eroded ever since the New Deal (or arguably the Civil War).

Eight years of economic stagnation have created a tremendous amount of restlessness. Looking at global trends, it seems that things are going to get worse before they get better. Historically, this type of chronic restlessness tends to lead to war, as leaders seek to either deflect it toward an outside enemy or channel it for their ruthless ambitions.

And both Clinton and Trump are nothing if not ruthless.

Everything old is new again. The authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century have resurrected and taken on new forms. Every day, I hear echoes of the deadly drumbeats on social media and the news.

Fascism is back. Communism is back. The 21st century equivalent of bookburning is taking place on campuses across the nation. The class warfare that started with the Occupy movement has taken on some decidedly racial undertones. If we’re following history’s playbook, a strong leader will soon emerge, promising security and prosperity at the cost of liberty.

Both Clinton and Trump promise to be that strong leader.

There’s a long tradition of doomsday predictions among political commentators in this country. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I’d like to chime in with some of my own. After all, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you.

First, the gobal economy is about to suffer a massive downturn. China, Russia, the Eurozone crisis—it’s all headed toward collapse. The US will come out on top, but only because we won’t fall as hard as everyone else. We’re still going to take a fall.

Healthcare in this country will continue to be broken and unaffordable for the next four years. Best case scenario, Obamacare collapses and the gridlock in Washington prevents us from replacing it with anything else. Worst case scenario, socialized medicine stiffles innovation, costs and inefficiences skyrocket, and committees are formed to decide who lives and who dies, just like every other nationalized healthcare system.

The originalists on the Supreme Court will be replaced with activist judges who will dismantle the checks and balances of the Constitution, causing it to hang by a thread. Frankly, this is the thing that scares me the most. It’s already starting to happen with the controversy surrounding Scalia’s replacement, and he won’t be the only Supreme Court justice who passes in the next four years. This will be the ultimate legacy of whoever wins the presidency in 2016.

The world is about to get a lot less safe for Americans abroad. It’s already a lot more unsafe after eight years of Obama, but it’s about to get worse. The chaos in the Middle East will spread. Terrorist attacks will accelerate, both abroad and at home. The wars and rumors of wars will increase.

There are a number of unlikely but plausible scenarios I’ve been mulling over. The most frightening of these involves a second American civil war, in the form of an insurgency, and the true nightmare begins when the UN sends a peacekeeping mission into this country much like Lebanon or the Balkans. Like I said, I don’t consider it likely. But it’s just plausible enough that it would make an excellent novel—the kind that later generations laud as being written before its time.

In short, I predict another four years of economic stagnation, fiscal irresponsibility in Washington, cronyism, corruption, and collapse. If America becomes “great” again, it will only be the Empire at the expense of the Republic.

So what am I doing about it?

Stocking up on food storage. Growing a garden. Learning how to be a responsible gun owner. Striving to be as independent and self-sufficient as possible.

And you can bet that all of this is influencing my writing. There’s a war of ideas that’s raging right now, one that may influence the ultimate outcome of our era more than any elected official. As a writer, I see it as my responsibility to play a role in that battle, not through message fiction per say but through stories that reflect truth. I have no idea if any of my stories will be as influential as 1984 or Les Miserables, but I intend to write them as if they could be.

It appears we’ve been cursed to live in interesting times. Let us rise to the occasion and write timeless and interesting stories.

Excited for a new old project

So a couple of weeks ago, I picked up the manuscript for a novel I’d written years ago, looking to see how much work it would take to salvage it. It’s a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, with James McCoy (again) as the main character. Long-time readers of this blog may remember it as Heart of the Nebula.

I wrote the first draft in 2010-2011 (started it almost exactly four years ago, in fact), and right from the start I could tell there were a lot of problems with it. I tried to throw in a romantic subplot that backfired horribly, and several of the major plot points weren’t thought out very well. I pushed through and finished it, though, and in spite of a few extra arms growing out of weird places, there was a lot of stuff in there that I liked.

(Come to think of it, I think this was my NaNoWriMo attempt back in 2010. That would explain why I pushed myself to finish the thing, even though I knew it had problems. I dropped it before the end of November and didn’t pick it up again until March, but since the only other books I had going on at the time were Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home, I forced myself to finish it just so I had another one. This was back when I was under the impression that every book needs at least five or six revisions to be any good, and that most of the work in writing is actually revising. I no longer labor under those myths).

Over the next few years, I went back to it from time to time to dust it off and run it through a revision pass. Unlike my other novels, though, this one was so broken to begin with that revising wasn’t enough. I changed a lot in the 2.0 revision, cutting out most of the worst problems but not really replacing them with anything better. In the 3.0 revision, I mixed things around a bit but didn’t substantially change the story. Then I went through a bunch of incomplete revision attempts, tweaking scenes and rewriting sentences, but not really changing the story as a whole.

Then last year, I read through all the sundry drafts that I’d written of this story and put together a massive set of revision notes for the 4.0 draft. This time, I tore into the heart of the story itself, reworking plot points and adding new subplots to replace the ones that didn’t work. I went through the whole thing by chapter and scene, making a list of bullet points for all the changes that needed to be made. I also made notes for scenes that I needed to write entirely from scratch, and other notes for scenes that I needed to recycle from previous versions.

It was a massive undertaking, and I got about halfway through it before putting it on hold for other projects. That was nine months ago. Between then and now, enough time passed for me to more or less forget most of my ideas for it.

So earlier this month, I had an opening in my schedule and decided to take a look at this one again. Instead of picking it up where I’d left of, I decided to start from the beginning. Immediately, I was struck by how much better the story was. This wasn’t the three-armed baby I’d stuffed into the closet back in 2011–this was a really compelling story, with an intriguing hook and great potential to go places. The further I got in it, the better it became.

There were a couple of scenes early on that just didn’t work. I could tell that I’d reworked them to death, so I threw them out and wrote completely new ones. This time, they actually worked! By completely getting rid of the problem scenes, amputating those mutated limbs at the base, I was able to free the story from the mess in which it had spawned. For some of these scenes, revision is not enough–they need to be tossed and rewritten from scratch.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve really gotten excited about this project. Not only do I think it’s salvageable, I think I can make a really awesome story from it. I just got to the middle of it today, past the part where I’d stopped back in February. For the next few chapters, I think I’m going to throw out the revision notes entirely and just see where the story goes. I’ll probably write toward the stuff I know I want to keep, but throw out everything else.

So yeah, you can expect to see Heart of the Nebula come out sometime next year, probably in the spring. I still want to run it past my first readers, but I don’t think it’s going to need any major revisions after this one (at least, not any that should take more than a week). Keep an eye out for it!

The Writer by Dosshaus on deviantART

I love these trailers

Holy cow, I cannot get enough of this trailer for Civilization: Beyond Earth! It’s like something from a book I would write. There’s the classic Science Fiction story about leaving Earth to colonize the stars, but there’s also a deeply human element to it. And I love the religious element to it, how the colonists take the old religions of Earth with them to the new world. Awesome.

This definitely looks like a game I want to play. I grew up with Civilization 2, perhaps the most classic title in the series, and discovered Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri in college. In a lot of ways, Alpha Centauri shaped my love for Science Fiction, and gave me many ideas that later influenced my stories. Genesis Earth is, in some very key ways, a response to the vision of humanity’s future presented in SMAC.

While on the subject of awesome trailers, it’s worth pointing out this one for the new Christopher Nolan film, Interstellar:

Again, this looks like a fantastic story–the kind of one that I’d love to tell just as much as I’d love to hear. And with all of our modern problems like climate change, resource depletion, wealth disparity, terrorism, and global war, it strikes frighteningly close to home. Are we as a species on the verge of driving ourselves extinct? What will we do if our home planet can no longer support us? Where could we go, and what could we hope for?

So much awesomeness. I really, really, REALLY want to see this movie and play this game! But even more, these trailers make me want to write an awesome story along those same lines. I’ve already written at least one novel that addresses these issues, and it’s definitely part of the background of the Gaia Nova universe, but I want to revisit these same issues again.

Maybe in Starship Lachoneus? Who knows?

W is for Writing the Next One

If you want to make a living as a writer, you’ve got to write a lot of books. One book is not sufficient to make a career, unless you’re the exception that proves the rule. But that’s okay, because writing is probably the thing that made you want to do this as a career in the first place. I mean, if writing is the thing that you love, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to do it more?

Sadly, I think a lot of writers put way too much pressure on themselves to produce the next book, and too often that takes all the fun out of the writing process itself, turning it into a miserable slog. I’ve certainly been there myself, and I have to say, the whole thing was just ridiculous. As soon as I regained my own confidence, I abandoned all those silly rules and metrics and just decided to write my own way, no matter whether it was right or not.

I used to keep a detailed spreadsheet where I tracked my daily word count, making all these pretty graphs to show how much work I was producing. Then I went overseas for a year, and the stress of living abroad made it difficult to keep up.

I found myself writing or revising stuff just to boost my word count, and abandoning projects at the first sign of a snag just because I knew that if I didn’t keep my momentum, the stresses of living in a foreign country would force me to take a break. It actually threw me into a funk for a while–not because I wasn’t creating stories, but because I wasn’t keeping my word counts.

So I decided to toss all that stuff out the window, and in the last 2-3 weeks before I went home for the summer, I wrote Star Wanderers: Dreamweaver (Part V) from start to finish. Once the pressure was gone, the story practically wrote itself.

Some writers thrive on external pressures like word counts, timers, and the like. Others think that they thrive, but they really don’t. They cling to writing rules and writing metrics out of habit, or because they’re familiar, or because someone with more experience told them that they should. The truth, though, is that every writer is different, and what works to keep one motivated might just get in the way of another.

It can change over the course of your career, too. The chief advantage of using these metrics is that it gives you a sense of progress, which can buoy you up substantially when you’re first starting out. It can be a real challenge getting through your first novel, or even your second or third, so having a way to measure your day-to-day work can be extremely helpful. But after you’ve written a few books and gotten your feet underneath you, those metrics can get in the way, especially if they make you feel guilty.

Of all the kinds of guilt out there, writerly guilt is probably the stupidest. There is nothing immoral or taboo about not hitting your daily word count. It does not make you a bad person or violate the laws of the universe. Why would you put that burden on yourself? It’s not like anyone else is putting it on you. Life is too short to beat yourself up for not writing.

Instead, learn to channel all the things that make writing fun. It can be, after all–that’s how we all got started in the first place! If you can learn to capture the thing that makes writing fun for you, and not lose sight of that, then even when the going gets tough and the writing becomes a slog, you can still get through it and come out with something that you feel proud of.

Not every part of the writing process is fun, just like not every process of climbing a mountain is fun. But taken as a whole, it’s exhilarating and awesome. I mean, check out this video of these two guys climbing Shkhara, the highest mountain in Georgia. There were moments in that expedition that were tough, but the challenge only made it more worthwhile. It’s the same with writing.

I love writing. I want to write more than a hundred books before I die, and I’m already well on my way. Writing an awesome story is its own reward, even though there are many other rewards that often come afterward. Having people read and enjoy your stories is the greatest reward of all, and it more than pays for all of the hard parts that come before.

On an episode of Writing Excuses, Tracy Hickman once said that no matter how many books you write, it’s important to believe that you haven’t written your best book yet. I’ve definitely found that to be true. That’s not to discourage you that the stuff that you’ve written is bad, but to encourage you that your next one will be even better. And more often than not, it will!

3am thoughts, or why everyone says to be an accountant

I’ve been reading in bed on my smart phone recently, which is probably a bad idea because it makes it harder to go asleep. At the same time, though, it tends to get my mind rolling, and when 3am comes around my thoughts tend to go some really interesting places. Sharing those thoughts is probably going to get me into trouble, but hey, you might find them interesting, so why not?

When I was eight years old, I knew I was going to be a writer. There was never any question about that. I spent all my free time making up stories, and my favorite stories were the ones I found in books. However, I knew I never wanted writing to be my job, because 1) everyone hates their jobs, and I didn’t want writing to ever become something I hated, and 2) everyone knows that writers can’t make a decent living. Even at the young age of eight, I had bought into some of society’s most pervasive myths about jobs, careers, and how to make money.

Americans are generally horrible with money–we struggle to keep budgets and put all sorts of things on credit, and pay more than twice what our houses are worth by signing mortgage contracts we barely even read. Because we’re so horrible with money, we tend to see it as a sort of magical force, something that can solve all our problems and make us happy. Rich people are like powerful wizards or sorcerers, so far above the rest of us that we can hardly fathom their ways.

Nowhere is our stupidity about money more apparent in the fact that most of us spend our lives acquiring it by working for some sort of hourly or salaried wage. Wages and salaries are basically the same, in that they convert time into money. That’s why we all measure income in terms of dollars per hour, or salary per year. But for anyone who understands how money works, that is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Money comes and goes, but time? Time is one of the most finite and precious resources known to man.

All of us are going to die someday. Most people are scared shitless by that fact, so we try to ignore it or put off thinking about it until some unspecified time in the future, like when we’re retired. But not all of us get the opportunity to put our affairs in order after retiring comfortably from the workforce. In fact, any of us could die tomorrow, or the next day, or at any other time. And even if we do all live to be centenarians, our time on this Earth is still finite. It’s non-renewable, too–you can’t go back and relive that day or that hour or that minute once it’s passed, no matter how much you regret it.

Converting time into money is basically trading gold for lead, or wine for water. Yet that’s exactly what we do, because money is this strange, magical force that so few of us understand. And the machines that do all the converting for us are businesses and corporations.

Questions like “where do you work?” “what is your job?” and “what do you make?” are much more common than “what do you do for a living?” That’s because most of us have bought into this idea that money comes from working for someone else, exchanging your time directly for a salary or paycheck. Sure, we do stuff with that time, but we don’t actually own it–the company does. While we’re on the clock, the company owns us and anything we produce. That’s the pact we make in exchange for this magical substance we call money.

It wasn’t until college that I started to become disabused of the childhood notion that I shouldn’t pursue writing as a career path. For one thing, I came to realize that plenty of people love their work–that just because you do something as a job doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll come to hate it. But it wasn’t until I graduated unemployed in the middle of a recession that I realized how much of a myth it is that writers can’t make a living.

You see, people say that about every career choice–every career, that is, except accounting. That’s because accountants are the ones who work for the businesses and corporations, counting the magical money. Since we all get our money from businesses and corporations, exchanging our time for money, the only career with complete security is the one that the businesses and corporations will always need. After all, they’re not going to go belly up, are they? Not the big ones, anyway. They can’t–they’re the magical machines where all the money comes from.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about money knows that the only real way to make a lot of it is to produce something of value that can scale. It’s not about time at all–it’s about producing something that people want, and producing it in such a way that the more you sell, the more you make. At no point in that equation does time become a variable. It’s certainly a variable in the production equation, but even there, it’s not necessarily the most important one.

The most important thing, though, is that you have to really own what you produce–and that means owning all the failures as well as the successes. When you work for a corporation, it’s easy to shift the blame. It’s a rare case where one person is solely responsible for bringing down the whole collective enterprise. But when you work for yourself, you can’t blame anyone else when things go wrong. You’ve got to be ready to take the risk, and the bigger the payoff then chances are the bigger the risk.

That’s why everyone says that you can’t make a living as a writer. They say the same thing about making a living as a sports caller, or a musician, or a political activist. I’ve even had people tell me that there’s no money in math or in Arabic. They say that because they think that money is supposed to come from corporations, and corporations only really need people who can count their money. Every other part of the business they can either figure out how to do it with robots or outsource the work to India. They might not outsource all of the jobs, but there’s always a risk that they’ll outsource yours (unless you’re an accountant, of course, because corporations always have money).

In the end, though, it’s all just silly. Money isn’t some sort of vague magical force, and it doesn’t come out of the void from businesses or corporations–it comes from making something that people are willing to pay you for. It comes from producing something of value, or at least convincing people that you have something of value. And you don’t need to sell your time at $7.25 an hour or $24,000 per year to do that. You just need hard work, a great idea, and the opportunity to succeed as well as fail.

So can you make a living as a writer/artist/blogger/activist/global nomad/whatever your dream happens to be? Of course! It won’t be easy–you’ll probably fail a lot, perhaps even spectacularly–but it is possible. So why not give it a try? At the very least, you shouldn’t buy into the myth that accounting is the only career path guaranteed to make you any money.

Quick update and a funny thing

First, just a quick update on my latest writing projects. I got the feedback from my second round of test readers for Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII), and while I think the story still needs work, it’s getting closer. I probably won’t be able to get it out by the end of September, but first or second week of October it should be ready.

It’s funny–I sent it to a guy and a girl, and while the guy thought it didn’t need any changes (and he’s studying to be an editor), the girl pointed out a few things that need a little more reinforcement and development. It’s mostly just minor changes I think, getting more into Noemi’s viewpoint and figuring out exactly what she’s going through, and making that clear to the reader. So yeah, it shouldn’t be too hard.

In some ways, writing this book has been like writing myself out of a corner. The story in Reproach runs parallel with the events of Sacrifice, and some of the stuff that happens there is pretty complicated. For example, it’s got a sixteen year old girl who feels like her only hope at happiness is to convince her best friend to share her husband, and the best friend actually kind of comes around to it by the end, though the whole ordeal is almost unbearable for her.

Writing about monogamous relationships is hard enough when you’ve always been single–it’s doubly hard when you’re writing about polygamy. But I’m actually fairly pleased with the way it’s come out so far–even though it’s not quite ready to be published, everyone who’s read it has really gotten into it, even the readers who haven’t yet read the earlier books in the series. It’s been a challenging book to write, but it’s been a gratifying one, and I think you guys are going to enjoy it.

Of course, all of this is yanking me away from Sons of the Starfarers, which is really kind of aggravating. On an interview I listened to recently, Jim Butcher said that writers are either writing, thinking about what they’re writing, or thinking about what they’ve written. The way my brain is wired, I can only really do one of those things at a time, and I’d much rather write or think about what I’m writing than think about what I’ve written. But yeah, Reproach is more important, so after finishing the current chapter I’ll put Sons of the Starfarers on hold for a couple weeks.

Also, I’m working to get print editions out for all of my Star Wanderers books before Christmas. Part of this is because of the new Matchbook program from Amazon, but mostly it’s just because … well, why not? For those of you who want paperback versions of these novellas, that will soon be an option. I’m having a little trouble figuring out the cover art (RBG vs. CMYK, getting the covers to print attractively instead of turning out way too dark, etc), but that shouldn’t take longer than a few weeks to iron out. Expect to see parts I-IV out by November.

Finally, a funny thing happened to me at Leading Edge. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a student-run science fiction & fantasy magazine where student volunteers read every story submission and write a critique for the author. Well, while sitting in the slushpile, one of the editors came in and showed me a story that I’d critiqued … twice! The first time, I’d given it a rejection. The second time, I’d actually recommended that the editors buy it!

Well, I racked my brain a little bit to figure out what had happened, and as close as I can tell the only real difference was in how distracted I’d been when I’d read it. The first time, it had been fairly noisy and there’d been a lot of distractions. The story had some good parts to it, which I mentioned in the letter, but I didn’t really pick up on the character motivations well, so I rejected it based on that. The second time, though, it had been quiet enough for me to really pay attention to the story, enough to really get what was going on. I finished it, and the ending moved me so much that I knew I’d have to recommend that we publish it.

The editor wanted to keep the rejection sheet anyway, but I tossed it in the garbage since really it wasn’t all that helpful anyway. And the moral, if there is one, is to pick up every story with the idea firmly in mind that you’ve got a potential gem in your hands. Too often, I think we read stuff flippantly, as if we already know that it’s not worth our time and attention. Well, don’t do that! Who knows but what you’ve got your new favorite story of all time sitting right in front of you? Give it a chance!

And on that note, I leave you with this:

See you guys around!