Writing and Rooting

Here I am:

Looking out into the blogosphere….

Big toe testing the blogowaters….

Allright, I can do this.

Deep breath…

hold it…

and…

Jump!

Hey there. Sorry about the above. It’s my first time swimming in this mighty ocean and I needed a moment.

And now for a confession: I’m a published writer. Five times over. Oh, and then there are the Cons – to date, I’ve been accepted to read from my work at fourteen of those. I’ve also been invited to talk about my writing at Colleges in Vermont, Michigan, Iowa, and even right here in Minnesota.

Scroll down to Shawn’s first entry. Go ahead, it’s a good one. The first Scribblerati post ever. And notice how he describes our writing group: we be five aspiring writers. Guess I forgot to mention some stuff to Shawn, huh?

Because, the thing is: I don’t think of myself as a published author. All the stuff I blathered on about above? That’s all academic writing. The writing you do when you’re faculty at a college or university. Maybe you’ve heard that saying? You know the one: publish or perish? It’s pretty much true. In most academic jobs, until you have tenure, (if you’re lucky enough to have a tenure-track job—which I don’t, btw,) you have to publish, or you’ll find yourself kicked out of those ivory towers. And so, in an attempt to avoid having your head smashed open after they’ve chucked you out the attic window, you publish. (Or you change your name to Rapunzel, grow your hair freaky long, learn some rodeo tricks and free yourself from the blasted tower.)

Anyway, I’m a philosopher by trade, so I have to write philosophical papers, which get read at philosophy conferences, (which we don’t actually get to call Cons,) which, hopefully, get published in philosophy journals. So I can keep getting paid for being a philosopher.

I’m also a fiction writer. Who is very, very much not published. And, in all honesty, not yet ready to be published. But hopefully, with the help of my Scribble-mates, my current project is nearing the state in which the story that I’m trying to tell is told as well as I can possibly tell it. Whether that story, even at its best, is publishable is, of course, another matter. (More on that in an upcoming post.)

Recently, when my work was up for critique by the group, someone (Shawn again) remarked that the writing I do professionally must be pretty different than the writing they’ve been critiquing. And in many ways that’s true: one doesn’t typically get to say things like “freaky-long hair” in an academic article. And yet, at its most basic, I think all of the writing I do starts from the same place.

I want to figure something out. And I want to figure it out badly.

I want to figure something out so badly, that I’m going to write and write and write until I’ve got it figured out. That’s what got me writing my dissertation, Knowledge, Communication, and Difference: An Integrative Theory. It's also what got me writing my novel, Once We Were Bears. (And, on their titles alone, which one would you rather read, dear reader?)

So that’s what my writing always is: I’m rooting around to get clearer about something that’s bothering me. I was bothered by white folks saying stuff like: “I can’t understand what people of color go through.” Bothered by it even though I know there is truth in the statement; bothered even knowing that one can say it with the best intentions. Because, I thought, shouldn’t we whites be trying to understand what folks of color go through? And since philosophers had done a particularly bad job of addressing the question of whether or not we can communicate what we know to others who differ from us, I thought, “well, this philosopher? she’s gonna try to do better.”

The thing I’m rooting around with in the novel, the thing that’s bothering me, pestering me like tongue worrying a loose tooth is my own participation in the destruction of the wilds. In very large part, our human ways of life, including my own, are making it such that there's a real possibility that the Wildthings won’t be found in our living world anymore. Instead they’ll live on only in books and movies and memories. So, I wonder about the bears.

What would a bear think about me, about humanity? That’s the question I’m trying to answer in my novel.

In the dissertation I argued that we can come to know what another human knows, even if we come from differing knowledge communities. In the novel, I’m trying to see myself and our shared world from the perspective of a bear. And how can I possible come to know that? I’m not sure I can. But maybe, just maybe, by writing and writing and writing, I’ll figure it out.

Getting to know me, getting to know all about me...

Hi, there!

Welcome to the Scribblerati’s new Group Blog. Glad you could make it.

My name is Jon Hansen, I’m a founding member and, believe me, that is as impressive an accomplishment as it sounds, if not more so.

But anyway, this is our place, and we plan on putting up regular posts every Friday, rotating the authorship between members, with random ones snuck in every now and then just to keep you all on your toes. So, with that in mind, and in the interest of getting down to brass tacks here… let’s get this week started.

As Shawn covered in his first post, we, the active agents and members of the Scribblerati, are a Twin Cities Writing Group formed out of Lyda Morehouse’s Sci-fi Loft Class. This happened a little over a year ago, give or take, and we’ve been chugging along ever since then. And as our projects progress, well, now comes the part where we begin to establish our presence on-line. I hope you stay awhile, have a look around and get to know us all.

Now, it’s true, at first glance, our group does tend to skew a bit genre-ish, and sometimes this can put people off. This particular implication doesn’t bother us, of course, however, it should be noted that we’re not exclusive to that type of fiction. Not at all. In fact, we are open, willing, and interested in any and all types, but since we met in a genre class, well.... what do ya’ want? Regardless, even within the boundaries of genre, I think it is safe to say that we’re a pretty eclectic and talented group, with each of us currently hard at work on our own particular projects.

Myself, (Jon Hansen… again. Hi.) I have recently begun the Query Process. My book is entitled: Gunslingers of the Apocalypse and it is basically Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead. It is a tale of love and war and life after the end of everything. I’m hoping, that due to the current market, the fact that it all takes place six months after the zombie apocalypse turns out to be a good thing for me.

Six months ago, the Dead rose and the world came to a sudden and violent end. A virus, new and deadly, burned its infection across the face of the planet. Everything changed then and a new world was born from the ashes of the old. In the aftermath, the choice was clear: You either learned the rules of survival or you joined the legions of the walking Dead.
“Black Magic” Jack El-Hai learns these rules; this is how he manages to stay alive in the fiery ruins of the Collapse when so many others did not. Amidst the chaos, Jack meets a young woman named Noelle Easter -- tattooed, resourceful, and rowdy -- they are a perfect match and soon, wild in love.
Together, they survive the end of the world.
However, staying alive means hard choices, it means spilling blood, it means killing. So when they finally find refuge in a small Midwestern town -- a place spared due to isolation and a tall fence -- Jack and Noelle also find a new purpose: scavenging. They spend their days among the ruins of the old world hunting for the things people need to survive. It’s a dangerous occupation, a daily battle against both the ravenous Dead and the murderous living alike, but the town’s people depend on them.
And while it’s not a great life, it’s better than most…
Lately, though, things are getting worse. Trouble is coming; Jack knows it. The Dead are gathering at the town’s borders in greater numbers, scavengers are dying beyond the fence, and the shaky truce struck with the rival camps of survivors is beginning to crumble. When the town is invaded and an iron-fisted new rule threatens everything he holds dear, including Noelle, Jack quickly discovers that the true monsters are not the ones locked outside the fence…they’re locked within.

Ooooooh… neat, huh? I think so… So, yeah, anyway, after much time and even more effort, I am finally done with the book and I am busy querying Agents, but what does that really mean?

Well, mostly, it means I get to wait. Wait, wait, wait and then wait some more. After that? More waiting. It’s kind of like being in the Army, you know? Hurry up and wait? It’s like that…except minus the hurry part. Each day, I wait for responses while obsessively checking and rechecking my e-mail. I expect rejection and I hope for acceptance, but mostly, I just wait. You see, my “plan” is to send out five Query letters at a time, when one comes back, why I’ll just send another one right out… and right now, they’re all still out there… somewhere… doing something…

And I get to wait.

So…. in the meantime, I am getting back into the already begun second “Black Magic” Jack El-Hai book. Right now, it is tentatively titled: Bastard out of Minnesota. My short term plan is for this book to serve as a distraction from my empty inbox, not to mention the querying process in general. My long term plan is, if I manage to finish this second book and find that I am still un-agented, I will type up the notes on the intended third and forth books, print them out, trunk the whole mess, and then move on to something else.

Until that day though, I continue to establish the series. After all, they say series are an attractive set up when pitching your work and that said series are made all the more shiny to Agents and Editors by having more than one volume completed, or at least started, at the time of initial query. And while, I’m not sure if that’s necessarily true or not, or if there even is such a thing as a hard and fast truism when it comes to walking the path to getting published, hell, I guess every little bit helps, right?

We’ll see…

So that’s me…. Jon.

Any questions?