Why I'm a Terrible Blogger

Pariahblog.com has come a long way since its start, about a hundred years ago, on the MySpace page a friend set up for me. Back then, I'd snail mail a short piece of writing from my prison cell (you can still read those 2007 posts – just check the archive) at a rate of about one per month. Then my friend would dutifully transcribe, spell-check, and post them for all to read.

Those early posts were necessarily sporadic. I had no Internet. For the record, I still don't. I didn't want to exploit my friend's generosity by making him type stuff all the time, so I kept my posts to a minimum. Writing one every few weeks wasn't good SEO strategy, but it had the benefit of being easy for us to maintain.

When he got busy with life and had to bow out, another friend took over. The person responsible for maintaining my blog actually changed many times over the years. Eventually someone took charge who could scan my typewritten pages. That system wasn't perfect – we still dealt with occasional typos, and the speed of the US Postal Service occasionally seemed glacial – but it felt pretty cool to still have a voice when circumstances conspired to bury me alive in a kind of silent grave. Now I have what passes for e-mail, and the whole process is an order of magnitude easier.

I fully recognize how fortunate I am. Not every prisoner, wrongfully convicted or otherwise, has the wherewithal to write regular dispatches, let alone ones that the outside world might read. And yet, for all this, I sometimes find myself squandering this fortune.

That I toil on this blog more than I do on my dark fantasy novel-in-progress, – which has all but stalled, two chapters in – is bad enough. Worse is the time I devote to any given post, which, if it's an especially deep dive, can take days. My reading list posts, such as this one, from last month, are the result of several months' notes, compiled over several days. The words you're reading at this very moment came together only after much humming and hawing, and represent a third revision of a much more generalized piece, a lament on time squandered when one should be writing.

I kept parts of the earlier drafts. Here's one now.

Advice for writers: start a blog. Also: don't spend more than an hour a day working on it. I take both of these messages to heart but am clueless about how to reconcile them. For instance, I sat down to compose this post a week late. All last week I'd been down on myself for getting too wrapped up in my job to come up with a post. Screw it, I finally thought, just write about how you wish you had more creative energy to spare, outside of work. That tuned into a slew of thoughts and reconsiderations, drafts and redrafts. Meanwhile, Chapter Three of my second attempt at a novel languishes. I know where it's going, I just haven't dedicated the time to see that it gets there.

And now here we are, with another blog post. It doesn't say much, really, because I don't believe I've got much suitable to relay right now. You've almost certainly not been entertained by it. For wasting your time I apologize. It seems that I've succeeded only in crafting an excuse, a copout, another drop in the bucket.

Synopsis-Writer's Cramp

There are a lot of things you don’t think about while writing a novel — the number of snow leopards still alive in the wild, what your face was before your parents were born, what Nickelodeon slime is made out of.... As a writer, hard at work on a novel, when you do inevitably dream about crossing the finish line, polishing that last little rough spot out of your manuscript, your mind might conjure book signings, readings, or receiving a lucrative advance, but I guarantee that no one in the history of ever thinks, "How am I going to write this book's synopsis?"

For those who don't know, the synopsis is a punchy summary of the book's plot, beginning to end, that's essential for finding a literary agent and courting potential publishers. It's not as easy as it sounds. In fact, as I just spent a couple of days learning, it's what ten-hour tension headaches are made of.

My novel clocks in at just under 110,000 words. (It took eight years to write, which is very different than saying that I worked on it for eight years.) It features ten narrators and scores of ancillary characters. It features text-message bubbles in one part, Arabic text in another. How could I possibly distill its fine-wrought plot, replete with echoes, overlappings, and allusions, to a few hundred words? The literary snob in me cried foul.

I did it, though. I hacked and I whittled, and, like a sculptor who just keeps chipping away at the stone until the artwork within is exposed, after a couple of days, I have a two-page synopsis that's coherent, free of adverbs, and, I hope, fascinating enough to attract a literary agent. Now I send it off and find something else to occupy my mind for three months while waiting for a response.

New Year, New Start

In the year 2020....

Some sci-fi masterwork of yore probably began with these words, then delved into a fantastical far-flung future featuring rocket cars, condominiums on the moon, and food in capsule form. The reality of this date, we all recognize, is a whole lot messier, but here we are, living the dream, one full week into the future.

I've started jotting some decidedly un-science fictional ideas in a composition notebook that hadn't been getting any use. Another book project bubbling up from the creative depths — or wherever such ideas come from — surprised me this past weekend. At this early stage, I'm not altogether sure I know how to classify it. "Speculative fiction" seems too vague; "horror" isn't it at all; "fantasy" involves too much whimsy. My elevator pitch would begin, So it's David Lynch meets Franz Kafka....

Last year saw me finish my first novel, a ten-part collection of interwoven narratives about the survivors of a zombie apocalypse. (It has yet to be published. I can only do so much to push this process along.) Finishing that methodical work took a lot out of me. So much research! So many delays! I honestly wasn't sure when or if I'd write long-term fiction again. Now, unexpected but welcome, the Muse reappears. She looks different than when I last saw her. There's a wild look in her eyes, and I know that this one's going to be a much more frenzied, inspired affair than my last effort.

My sangha chose for our January theme "New Year, New Start." Like a mantra, we've been repeating it to each other at times when our adherence to Buddhism's precepts seems most strenuously tested. It's like advising our Buddhist brethren (and ourselves) to be mindful: "Hey, remember your practice." But it also serves as a source of inspiration. Every breath, every moment, every hour, every day is a rebirth. We are continually in this state of flux and therefore capable of an infinite range of changes.

According to Writing in Flow, one of the last books I read last season, falling into the deepest possible state of engagement with your writing project often demands that you perceive it as a challenge. Well, here's a fresh puzzle for my mind to work out — a weird new world for me to discover, with myself being remade in the process.

Beginning afresh can be intimidating. We humans are such creatures of habit. The familiar, the tried and true, the relatable — these comfort us but can also hinder our growth and leave us stagnant. I have the benefit of seeing the same gray concrete walls day in, day out. There's no way out. This sameness makes it essential for me to stretch my mind through the cracks, out into realms of thought and fancy to which reality sometimes pales in comparison.

This strange new book is going to be like nothing I've tried writing before. This year is going to be like none I've lived before. The two are connected, but there's more to it than just the imaginative journey I'm about to embark on. Other good things are happening. The world is constantly changing. We're constantly changing. Look around: we're already living a speculative-fiction future. This is amazing stuff.

How Long Does It Take to Write a Novel?

How long does it take to write a novel? I didn't note it on my calendar, but a peek back in time turned up this blog post first referencing what became the seed of my manuscript. The answer, therefore, if you're me and you're writing a 300-something-page novel-in-stories set against society's collapse amid a fast-spreading pandemic, is this: it takes about eight years.

I put the final touches on the last page yesterday. How to describe the feeling of putting a project like this to bed, after every day of the last ninety-five months involved the application of thought to it? It still doesn't feel real.

Friends tipped off about my project's wind-down asked me what near-, medium-, and long-term plans I had for afterward. I hadn't given it a lot of thought. Working on the manuscript occupied significant mental resources. I kept pushing other things aside in order to make room for writing, but the work only involved some actual writing.

Halfway through, in 2015, I drew a little comic about writing on one's feet. I drew a lot of comics that year. Too many, really. Once I realized that, I drew a comic announcing I was done drawing comics for a while. You know, as one does.

I engrossed myself in weird, wide-ranging, seemingly irrelevant research, from survivalism to trangenderism, from satellite navigation to garden irrigation, from neurophysiology to Islamic theology. You've got to turn over an entire library, some sage soul said, to create a single book. That applies to scholarly works and works of post-apocalyptic zombie fiction equally, I discovered.

The characters this research allowed me to write are like parts of my self. I know them intimately — arguably too intimately, since so much of who they are, from their histories to their favorite smells, although known to me, never made it onto the page. Is this the sense that every writer experiences at the end of a long literary journey? These nonexistent characters were alive in my head. As of yesterday, because they have no possible future, they face a type of purgatorial, eternal now, having ceased to be. Is this what parents feel like, sending their kid off to college?

Nature abhors a vacuum. Another project (courting publishers doesn't count) will fill the void left by this one soon enough. I have no plan to force it. It'll come when it comes. Meanwhile, as my latest post on recently read books attests, I have ample leisure reading at my disposal and plan to indulge in it... just in time for summer.

Two Books I Spent My Spring Reading

I wouldn't have thought it would be hard to best my meager reading list from last season — I just had to read more than three books this spring. It didn't happen. One big obstacle (nearly removed) was polishing and sending off the final pages of my novel-in-stories. How can a guy read when he's wrapping up a nine-year literary project? Then the ever-generous Veronica S. surprised me with another order of some delicious-looking sci-fi, and I had to read a couple of the books she so kindly sent.

One was As She Climbed Across the Table, which vindicated Jonathan Lethem completely after the disappointment that was Amnesia Moon. I'm almost ashamed that I ever found fault. This short novel has just about everything one wants in a Lethem book. It has a fanciful premise: a woman falls in love with a incorporeal area of null space. It has quirky wit (such as when the narrator muses, "Do you think there are bootleg tapes of Muzak outtakes? Maybe they get excited by the groove and really cut loose sometimes. And the producer says, okay, boys, that was swell but now let's try to get this wrapped up so we can all go home. I'll bet that happens all the time."). It has outlandish character names (Carmo Braxia, Georges De Tooth, Gavin Flapcloth). And it has emotional sincerity that never devolves into gross sentimentality. Yes, I was pleased.

Neal Stephenson wrote Zodiac, a so-called eco-thriller, just a few years before Snow Crash, his prescient novel about VR and the future of the Internet. Snow Crash and William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic were hugely influential on my growth as a geek, so reading pre-Snow Crash Stephenson risked tainting my opinion. Zodiac has action aplenty, accented by Stephenson's sarcastic wit. But it did pale in comparison to Snow Crash. To be fair, Zodiac, a 316-page novel, took me almost all May to read. I clearly couldn't give it my usual close attention. Even so, a couple of editorial gaffes — extra spaces, a misspelled name, and other such relatively minor typos — leapt off the page at me. This is what happens when you're polishing your own manuscript while trying to read for pleasure. I don't recommend it. It's why I read nothing else this spring. There was other demanding business in my life, which, combined with finishing my novel, demanded maximum focus.

Writing My Way to "The End"

Friends know that I'm writing what might be the world's first novel tap-typed on a tablet PC. (Calling it a zombie novel is on par with likening The Hunchback of Notre Dame to a romance novel.) I wrote how my typewriter crashed and burned in January, a catastrophe that left me no real choice than to use the JP5s tablet I blogged about receiving last year to finish the final draft of my novel-in-stories. That's exactly what I've been doing, these past four months, and it's been even more challenging than you might expect.

The JP5s has a seven-inch screen. Without my pinchy new nerd glasses, writing on it sometimes makes my eyes hurt. Never mind the slowness of dispensing with my lightning-fast keyboard skills in order to thumb the onscreen Android keyboard like a maniac. I might be getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

My tablet features no word processor program. That would be too much like right. Instead I've had to type hundreds of pages into JPay's proprietary e-mail app, which limits each e-mail to 6,000 characters — roughly two and a half typewritten pages. Special characters like ñ and é are for some reason deleted by the app when a message is sent. Worst of all, there's no spell check. Good thing I'm fastidious.

Nevertheless, the final draft is about twenty-five pages from being done. Oh, wait, make that twenty-seven. My finger slipped. I accidentally deleted an e-mail in my Drafts folder yesterday. In my defense, it was right above the e-mail I intended to delete, which was pointless and silly and had nothing at all to do with this nine-year project I'm striving to get done. There's no message-recovery option; gone is gone.

Today I retyped the missing bits, hoping like hell that I recall the good revisions I originally made. What I have now is pretty close to what was there before that errant finger did its thing. The zombies still kill pretty much everyone. It's all in a day's writing.

This Novel Won't Write Itself

Those who asked after the progress of my novel, in the years since I wrote the accidental first piece of it, were usually told that I'd finish it sometime between next month and the inevitable heat death of the universe. I would not be pressured. Ever capricious, the Muse visits episodically.

Being beholden to the Muse's comings and goings is a terrible way to write. Some days I'd manage to bang out pages of content and feel as though I finally had some momentum going. Then months would pass while I futzed around with nonsense. Research made a handy excuse: "I can't write that part until after reading the Koran" and "I'm stuck here until someone sends me that information about injectable testosterone" were both effective stalls. Most often, though, my available time to write got arrogated by personal correspondence.

The realization struck me hard, about a month ago, that I was never going to be a novelist at this rate. Something had to change, and only I could change it.

Finding time is one matter, but when a thing's important enough you make time for it. True to form, I buckled down and made ready. I blocked off weekdays, from 8 AM to 2 PM, as dedicated writing time. I made a sign to hang on my door, which reads, WRITING — DO NOT DISTURB. I decided in advance that my only allowable deviations from routine would be for institutional appointments, unavoidable phone calls, and, once a week, an hour of morning recreation.

I mailed out a final batch of letters. I told my friends that I was embarking on a long trip in my one-man craft, during which time I'd be, as though on a long sea voyage, largely incommunicado. The responses that I got back were encouraging. "See you on the other side" and "May the wind be always at your back" were my favorites.

The novel, I'm pleased to report, is coming along well. I don't find it unreasonable to think that I'll have a polished manuscript ready by year's end. (I'm already ahead of the loose schedule I set myself.) The trick is not taking my eyes off the horizon.

Writer’s Cramp #38

Writer’s Cramp #12

Writer’s Cramp #11

Writer’s Cramp #10

A Musing on Character, Plot, and My Current Writing Project

As do most grand plans, it began with a simple enough idea. The story I wanted to write would be about a young autistic shut-in oblivious to society’s disintegration around him in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Only when his weekly grocery delivery doesn’t come does the character, Ethan, venture out for food. How would the autistic reliance on routines, Ethan’s disinterest in people (alive or undead), and his myopic worldview lead him to face the challenge of trekking across town amid shambling flesh-eaters — and how would he react when the comfort of his small apartment got obliterated by the inevitable collapse of the power grid? These were the questions I set out to answer in the form of my story. As I said, it started out simply.

The story I ended up with (mentioned briefly in this post, last summer) was twenty-eight pages — too long to submit to any magazine for publication, too short to be a book. Nonetheless, everyone thinks their offspring is beautiful and perfect, and I loved my monstrously obese brainchild. I just couldn’t show it off to anyone because it was too fat to go outside.

Writers do this all the time, committing to paper the commercially unusable, simply because a particular story demands to be told. It’s like demonic possession, minus the vomiting of pea soup. Knowing that I’m in good company for having created something ostensibly worthless did nothing to lessen the feeling that I wasted a couple of weeks of my life when I filed my story, “The Association, Ethan Birch,” into a folder bulging with other misfit works I’ve written under the influence of the Muse.

That Muse, she’s a capricious thing. Those weeks I spent writing, rewriting, and polishing “The Association, Ethan Birch” were actually time I was ignoring another, more ambitious project, a sci-fi novel I summarized inartfully (not to mention inaccurately) as “Rain Man on a spaceship.” After months of false starts and tens of hours of research into a motley array of subjects — weaving-loom operation, chromatophore reflection in cuttlefish, the possibility of Lorentzian wormhole traversal as a means of interstellar travel — I realized that my novel-in-progress could not overcome one critical stumbling block: all the factual correctness and theoretical plausibility in the universe couldn’t make up for the narrator, an autistic savant with a faculty for machines, being totally unrelatable.

To a great degree, character is story. Who a protagonist is determines much of a plot, far more than all the deus ex machina happening in bad TV may suggest. Desires, fears, quirks, curiosities, shortcomings — these shape a character’s decisions, and no matter how white-knuckled a writer may want to grip his story, no matter how many natural disasters, serious illnesses, or freak accidents he enlists to assert authorial control, the characters are the ones who decide how a narrative will unfold. At least, this is how it goes in effective fiction. A writer could presumably construct a story around nothing but elements that are beyond conscious human influence, but then he’d have a Michael Bay script: CARS’ BRAKES GIVE OUT, MILE-WIDE METEORITE COLLIDES WITH EARTH, VOLCANOES ERUPT... and so on.

Having interesting and believable characters is an obvious part of the challenge a writer faces. Ensuring that the anticipated story is flexible enough to accommodate those characters is another part. To make the novel I was writing work, the story had to be told in the first person. Yet the protagonist’s unrelatable otherness was irreducible. To change him would be to alter the plot; to alter the plot would be to fail to tell the tale I needed to tell — a situation too twisty to even call a catch-twenty-two. (And here’s a bit of dramatic irony: the working title I had for the novel was Singular.) Another, less flattering but more honest way of expressing this is to say that the tale I wanted to tell sucked.

I put the draft I’d been writing on indefinite hold, and it was then that I wrote “The Association, Ethan Birch,” a story that, for all its apparent simplicity, would launch me deep into thought and spawn a whole other project.

Ethan, the narrator of the story, encounters other people during the crosstown journey that comprises the first part of his ordeal. And although these people only appear in the story for a brief while, occasionally just mentioned in passing, perceiving them through the lens of Ethan’s super-exaggerated literalism and naiveté made me wonder who they really were, how they might view Ethan, and how the collapse of civilization would transform everyone into a blank slate, forcing many to reinvent themselves according to the standards of the new order. Identity, as apprehended and projected (sometimes misleadingly) was suddenly on my mind a lot.

My brain often floods when I think. Much of that spill-over ends up on paper. The ideas that flowed from my consideration of the characters throughout “The Association, Ethan Birch” came out in notes. Max from Humboldt is full of shit and Why is the woman at the church? were two. Then there were the more practical inquiries: What happened to Gina? and How did Trish and company end up as traveling companions? I hadn’t intended for any of them to be deeply considered; still, ostensibly throwaway characters haunted me. Like someone who put feeder mice into his pet python’s terrarium, only to soon afterward feel an empathetic urge to check on them, I wanted to get to better know the people I invented, and to find out how they fared in that wasteland I so callously cast them into.

I considered other hypothetical scenarios that might arise in my zombie hellscape, too, and have expanded on the inventory of personalities I began with. (Not being too well-versed in the genre, beyond George A. Romero movies, the novel World War Z, and the Walking Dead TV series, may have helped as easily as hindered me.) I wanted to explore who people become when their environment makes it nearly impossible to retain their full humanity, to delve into how they cope: what’s the first thing to go; what can’t be let go of? It should surprise no one that the aforementioned gamut of human experience makes excellent story fodder.

And just like that, I’m working on another book — a series of interweaving first-person accounts that are lurid and lovely, chaste and obscene, poetic and mundane as real life, but accentuated by the horror that’s become the everyday. It’s to be a novel-in-stories about somnambulists in a waking nightmare, a book whose plot lines are determined almost wholly by the whims of its characters — an about-face, in terms of technique, from the way Singular moved. I’m excited to see where this book’s inhabitants lead me.

Things I Write When I Should Be Writing Something

In late June I began writing a science fiction novel. Sort of. “Writing,” in the sense I mean it here, translates to “outlining and amassing copious notes for.” To claim that the work I’ve put into the project thus far has involved much actual writing — that is, the construction or arrangement of sentences that might end up in even the roughest of manuscript drafts — would basically be lying. I’ve written one sentence. Mind you, I think it’s quite a qood sentence, meeting all the criteria prescribed by so-called experts for a quality opening sentence for any narrative: inviting inquiry, stating something integral to the plot without giving anything away, providing characterization for the protagonist, sounding good…. So I have been working on my novel, completing steps that are part and parcel of the writing process. My attentions are simply elsewhere.

For my reading, these past four months, I’ve chosen exclusively sci-fi and fantasy books. “Priming the pump,” is how I described it in my latest posted reading list. The tactic worked too well, though. Yes, reading all that speculative fiction caused my ideas for the novel to flourish, but ideas for other projects did, too. The story collections I’ve been enjoying so much unintentionally focused my mind on the short form, so even though I have all these notes and printed encyclopedic articles relevant to my novel, and am intellectually prepared to bend to that work, short stories have seized my exclusive interest. It’s frustrating. And incredibly fun.

My short-fiction jag began when I went back to revise a somewhat surreal 2,000-word story — “Remembrance” — about artificial intelligence and grief, which I wrote nearly two years ago. The editorial feedback from the magazines I sent it to, in the only round of submissions I sent the story on, was encouraging. For unremembered reasons, I never got around to making the suggested changes — foolish of me, no matter what my excuse was. Now, having finally (I hope) repaired what in the first version was broken, I’ve sent the manuscript back to one of the original commentators. Maybe “Remembrance” will make the cut now. I’m pleased with the changes I’ve made to it, particularly the 500-word increase in length and the removal of some ambiguity I’d initially mistaken for compelling mystery. This manuscript has been out for several months, which I can barely resist thinking means it’s being seriously considered for publication.

Motivated by how good I believe “Remembrance” turned out, I spent a week writing an atmospheric 4,000-word story titled “Dragons” — a fireside tale of off-world colonization gone genocidally wrong. It’s pretty grim. To balance out that gritty creation, I tried my hand at writing a humorous piece of flash fiction. The result of that is a trifle of urban fantasy I call “Doorbell, Book, and Candle.” Preliminary reports are that it’s a fun read, so I consider it a success. But will these two pieces meet editors’ approval?

The work receiving most of my attention for the previous weeks represents yet another leap of imagination: a satirical 11,000-word work in progress involving a young autistic man, the zombie apocalypse, and one very late grocery delivery. I feel hobbled when the time comes to title my stories, and the struggle to name this one is almost as protracted as anything in its plot. I don’t know if this should worry me or not. Thus far, I’m pleased with the story, even though it’s longer than it will probably need to be for publication. People who give writers advice about such things say it’s best to just tell the story that’s begging to be told, and worry about submission guidelines later. That’s exactly what I’m doing, and my unnamed adventure through the world of the undead is proving very fun to write, as a result.

Will I get back to my novel soon? Absolutely. But it’s been so long since I’ve been this prolific with fiction of any length, so I’m allowing my muse to run her course, whatever crazy route she chooses to take.