Everyone must

" 'Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die... It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.' "

Ray Bradbury wrote this in Fahrenheit 451, which I just finished reading. If ever you doubt what the purpose of all this toil is (I know I have), or find yourself wondering whether it will ever be worth it (I know I do), then read that book. It has forced me to re-think why we do it, and why it is important.

Because the books, the stories, they are important. Even if they're just meant to be fluff, or a fine and rousing adventure, a legend, nothing to be taken seriously... it's still important. They are a part of you, and they are important.

The Creative Collective

A long time ago, when I was young and silly, I believed that to be a good writer, your imagination would need to be full and brilliant enough that you never needed creative input from another. I thought that to need assistance with your own work from someone else meant that it would no longer be truly yours.

What I have since learned is that the best works are never solely the creation of the person whose name is on the "By..." note.

Creativity, to me, is a like an energy force that all people can tap into with varying degrees of regularity and success. It's the true magic that exists in this world, and we all have a connection to it. However, what each person does or sees or builds or dreams with it is completely different. We are all limited by what we can take in at any given moment. This is why getting and giving input with other creative people is nothing to be shunned.

Art and I have been blessed with a particularly incredible source of feedback from one of our best friends. To my knowledge he has never written anything himself, but he has read a lot of stuff. Plus, he is intelligent enough to understand what elements makes stories good and why. During some of our brainstorming sessions, I recall being happy with his input as well as a little concerned about how our story would have turned out without it. But since then, I've learned not to worry so much and instead just be grateful. Besides, creative people tend to act like magnets to each other.

If you are like I was and worried about the "purity" of your creative works, remember that no creative work is pure by default. We all derive inspiration by previous works or merely by what we see around us. Nothing is created in a vacuum. And sometimes, a single work is simply too big for one person to create on their own. Just look at the Making Of features of any movie and marvel at the number of people needed to build just a single sequence, the number of differing elements that most of us rarely even think about coming together to make that moment.

So we now know that listening to other creative people is of benefit. That doesn't mean every piece of feedback and every idea someone throws at your project is a good one. Think of yourself as the captain of a ship. Different people with specialized duties and fields of expertise can all contribute to making the ship sail, but only you decide where the ship will go and how it will get there.

Sometimes there's a lot of decision-making that goes into the process of writing. And I think that it's the strength of your decision-making, rather than the size of your imagination, that really makes you a writer.

Rejuvenation

A good fellow writer-friend of ours has had a spot of fortune. He completed his second manuscript a while back, and it is now in the hands of not one but two prospective literary agencies. He's been at this for longer than Art and I, and has helped and supported us many times over the years in our own writing. Praying and keeping our fingers crossed that this will be his break.

I myself reached a satisfying personal milestone. As often happens when one lingers in a place for long, clutter accumulates. Eventually it bogs down your creative senses. Well now, clutter is no more! I was astonished by the difference I felt almost immediately, not realizing how weighed down I was by all the junk. The experience taught me that we, as writers, should be mindful of how our environment can affect us. We have much within us to nurture and care for, and to do our art justice we should maintain our emotional health as much as our physical and mental health.

Greetings, folks. I realize how long this blog has been inactive, and my apologies to our friends who had been keeping up with it. The last several months have been depressingly dry of writing activity and instead full of questions and reevaluations. It hasn't been an easy time, but then such periods can be rewarding in other ways.

Before anyone gets concerned, no, Art and I are not giving up the writing business. We've got too many great things planned, with more being added to the list every day, to consider just stopping. It's too much a part of us. No, for me, I've been rethinking why I want to do this... why it's a part of me.

Fifth grade. That's really when it dates back to. Doing creative writing assignments was nothing new, and they could be fun and all, but I never thought about doing any writing on my own. Then we were asked to write our own mystery story, and I'm not sure what happened to me. I got an idea right away, an idea that I was so excited about that I spent every free moment of time working on it.

We were supposed to read them in front of the class on their due date. I was a little embarrassed by that point, because mine ended up being the longest written by far, but still I was proud of it. I still remember some of the looks I got from my classmates as I went back to my seat: they were astonished that such a thing could have come from me. I was one of those in-between kids, not belonging to any particular clique or social group but with friends or acquaintences in most of them. Those kids, by nature, actively avoid labels and try not to distinguish themselves. That moment, when I went back to my seat with smiles and whispered congratulations following in my wake, was the first time I had ever felt noticed. And it felt good.

Of course, once you do get noticed, then you get labeled. I was labeled the Writer. Not that I minded at first. I felt like I had found my calling in life, something I could enjoy fully while being good at it, and for the first time I had a definitive answer whenever someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. But then I made a mistake.

Self-esteem is a hard thing to manage, and I've always been pretty bad at it. My identity became bound up in writing. People expected great things from my creativity, and I couldn't stand the idea of disappointing them. It became a one-sided competition; my work needed to be the best, because I was the Writer, and without that I would go back to being nothing. Somewhere towards the end of high school, when the pressure I was putting on myself became too great, I declared myself hopeless and talentless and gave up my dream.

Why the history lesson? Because even though I have rededicated myself to writing, that bad habit hasn't gone away yet. I love writing, but I still get an added thrill when someone smiles and praises my work, and I remember what it's like to feel noticed and special. And always lurking in the dark of that... the feeling of dejection when something isn't praised, doesn't feel the best. And that's what I've been struggling with these last several months.

Poor Art... he offers me encouragement and chides me on my silliness when appropriate. But he can't do the heavy lifting for me. All he can do is wait at the top of the cliff while I struggle pulling myself up the rope.

No writing is perfect, because no writer is perfect. We all wrestle with our own shortcomings. And the question at the end always remains the same: where do you go from here? I close these thoughts with no answer. Rather, I will let the productivity or lack thereof in the coming months speak for me.

Memories of the past, ideas for the future

Today I was recalling a subject one of my best friends in high school and I liked to have, especially after English courses when we were studying some of the "great" writers of the world. I use the parenthesis there not as mockery or to imply that these writers weren't great, but to demonstrate how different the impressions can be for people who are not writers.

Scholars and academics love to speculate and hypothesize what the great writers of the past were really saying in their writings. All of the hidden meanings and symbolism and allegory. There is a wealth of collected knowledge on these subjects, and then every couple of years or so, someone else will come up with a totally different theory that is supposed to send an earthquake of revelation through this branch of study.

My friend and I theorized that sometimes it's hard to pin down what these writers "actually" meant was because they weren't really trying to say anything.

Both of us were prolific writers throughout our school days, and we noticed that sometimes, when we showed our work to others, they would comment on how they loved this symbolism and that hidden message... only, we had written those words without any thought to symbolism at all! Oftentimes it would make sense how they would come to that impression, so it would turn into a kind of happy accident. It made us think, though. If our own amateur work could be re-interpreted, or in some cases misinterpreted, couldn't this have happened to those great writers of our past?

You see where the parenthesis comes in now. I do believe that these writers were great, but not necessarily for the reasons the academics like to tout. Sometimes writers just need to write. It's how we deal with the backlogs of emotions or thoughts or impressions that arise in human life. And sometimes in those times we will write without giving any real deep thought to what we are writing about. What words we chose to put to paper can be explained so easily as "because it sounded cool at the time."

So is it a bad thing to speculate about what a writer "meant"? Hardly. That's like saying it's bad to have an opinion. I would just caution people to be prepared for their opinion to be completely wrong.

And as a writer, I think it's awesome when readers take away things that I hadn't intentionally put in the material. That means they make it their own. But it is going to make me giggle if people start spouting off their impressions of my work as if it's gospel truth.

My personal advice to the writers out there is be prepared for people to forge their own opinions about your work. Strooooong opinions. Wrong opinions. Correct them when you feel it's necessary, but try to keep it respectful and don't take it personally. Maybe that's just their way of dealing with the emotions of life too.

Moving along

Two rejections so far from our current batch of queries, with the rest still pending. It's a busy time for agents, it seems. A lot of them are coming back from book fairs and conventions and trying to work on their query backlog... which, if you're a prolific agent, can pile up very quickly. Definitely need to give props again to our friend Eric for introducing us to Querytracker.

Work on the new project continues apace. We will be getting the scene plotting done this week, and once that is complete, work on the first drafts and new beta packs will begin. Already people have been asking for them, which makes me happy even as I feel slightly guilty that they're a little behind schedule. Art and I are very lucky to have so many wonderful people rooting for us and helping us out.

Thoughts on querying

The first batch of new queries is underway. Keeping our fingers crossed and preparing the next batch if these come back with rejections. I was tempted to say "when"... but let's not be so negative! You never know what's waiting for you after that first or 500th query.

The querying process is actually kind of fun for me. If you're doing it right, then it's time-consuming, because each agent is unique with different requirements, and each one merits a custom query letter. And there's always a thrill you get when firing off that finished email or dropping the envelope in the mailbox. "Could this be the one?" you silently ask yourself. "Will it soon be time to move on to the next phase of my career?"

Just never forget that your career, at the heart, is always to write. So keep writing. Don't let your creativity dry up from anxiety as you hover by your mailbox or spasmatically refresh your email. After all, you never know what inspiration will bring either, or where it will strike, so you have to do your best to always be ready for it.