The Perils of Being a Writer (My Own Worst Enemy)

There are many things that I hope for and wish for in this world. Among them, there are of course, the usual suspects. An end to war, hunger, discrimination, things like that. There are also many other, less lofty, hopes and wishes that I have.  Like, for instance, for the Minnesota Gophers to field a competitive (much less winning) football team in 2010, or that Steve Jobs sees the error of his ways and decides to name the new Apple tablet after something other than a feminine hygiene product. Yet, high up on any list I might decide to make would be this: that someday, inshallah, I will be able to quit my frakking day job.

Now, bear with me a moment while I explain. I have had an extraordinarily horrible last couple of weeks at work. I won't go into all the details because it would just stress me out and bore all of you to death, so let's just say it was really icky and leave it at that. I would love to be able to blame all that horribleness on work and absolve myself of any responsibility in the matter, but if I'm really honest with myself I have to admit that I'm part of the problem. More specifically, Writer M e is part of the problem.

You see -- and those of you who are writers will get this right away -- I think about things. A lot. When somebody says something, I wonder why they said it. When somebody does something, I wonder why they did it. If it stopped there, you probably wouldn't be reading this, however, I have a problem. I think about things. A lot.

A LOT.

I don't just think about things, I ruminate. I think about what happened, and then I torture myself by extrapolating on it. What if I had said this in response? Or what about that? How does so-and-so feel about my reaction to the situation? Are they mad? How mad are they? What might they do? Who might they be telling? What would I do if they told so-and-so? (Let's think about that for a while.) And, oh my God, if they did that, would it mean they think this or that?

You get the drift, my friends, and oh yeah, it's sick. I'm sick. I can't turn it off. It runs all the time. It runs when I'm in the shower. When I'm eating. When I'm at work. When I'm in the car. When I'm in yoga. When I'm at church. When I'm in the can.

It -- is -- incessant.

I suppose, if I sit back and look at all this objectively, I could put on the glass half-full spin and say this sickness of mine is really a good thing. A strength. I, Shawn Enderlin, have an overactive imagination and that overactive imagination is going to lead me to great places. I'm going to write great stories and I'm going to do great things, and some day, by the Grace of God, I'm going to be able to quit my day frakking job and spend all of my time doing what I love, writing.

Or maybe not.

Meh.

All I know, is that this overactive imagination of mine means one thing: I am, despite my best intentions, my own worst enemy.

Inspiration

Inspiration. It's such a slippery thing. What is it? Where does it come from? How do you find it and hold on to it and where can you get more when you need it?

I don't have an answer.

Well, ok, that's not true, I mean, I do sort of have an answer... but: "It's everywhere, if you just look!" sounds a little too much like the useless platitudes found in those up-with-people type of children's show, the kind where the aging hippy host wears brightly colored suspenders.

But then, I guess that's the rub, right? Inspiration is everywhere and if you keep your eyes open and put a little effort into keeping track of all of it, then you will find that you won't have any lack of ideas-- now, whether or not they're good or bad, of course, well, that is a whole other animal, but I digress...

I keep various file folders saved in a couple of different locations as insurance against some kind of catastrophic event. I have an e-mail folder full of e-mails that I've sent myself that contain nothing but links. I have scads of random, weird pictures. And some day, long after I'm dead and gone, some poor bastard will have to sift through all of my files and there they will find pages and pages of pictures and reams of cluttered and cryptic Word Docs that all say things like:

"Remember the Academy--long gone."


Or: "Great beasts lurking in the mist..."


Or: "He's not the first to step foot here..."


They're pages of disconnected short-hand, nothing but nonsense, a jumble of pictures and words quickly jotted down and cataloged and hopefully in such a way that when I stumble upon them again while idea-trolling, at some point in the unknown future, the stored combination of them will trigger a recall of the whole (or at least, the interesting parts of the) story idea.

So far, it's been pretty successful system for me. Upcoming pieces and potential storyline ideas for my first book were stored in such a way, and successfully retrieved when needed, as well. It's not a perfect system, of course. Every once in a while, I come across something like this:

"Bad Tinkerbell..."


Hmmmm... not sure where I was going with that...

Anyway, in general, those are just minor bumps in the road. Usually, the process works (again: for me). So, my point is: Watch, listen, and record. Keep an active and alive folder of ideas. Save all of those crazy pictures you stumble across. And always record those little snippets of conversations or random moments that occur to you on whatever scraps of paper are at hand, just don't forget to transcribe them to your file later. Remember.

The main idea for my first book came from three places.

1. A general feeling of dissatisfaction with the way my, at that time but currently cryogenically stored, work in progress was coming together. Lots of good pieces... I love some of the visuals... but it just wasn't quite right... I loved the zombies, though... and these two side characters...

2. A massive disappointment in George Romero's fourth zombie movie Land of the Dead. Sloppy. Half-baked. The world building made no sense. How can paper money have any value at all in a Post Zombie Apocalypse World? Zombie emoting? Horrible! The whole scavenging idea was good, but the idea of trying to live in a large population center while raiding small towns for supplies seemed somehow backwards to me...

3. A bus ride. It must have been almost four years ago now, maybe more, winter was ending, but it was still chilly out. Cold enough where you couldn't wear a light jacket, but warm enough that you would sweat in your big coat. The streets were nothing but a sloppy mess of mud and brown slush. The skies were overcast and dreary and everyone around me looked haggard and pale and worn out and for some reason, a lot of people riding the 17 line have luggage with them... and they're NOT going to or from the airport... it's weird...


So anyway, I'm on this bus, gazing listlessly out in the deepening twilight and thinking about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina and American Refugees (which is apparently an incorrect term, as foreign is an integral part of the definition... which is why they started calling them Katrina Victims, I guess...) and broken urban landscapes, etc, etc... (Note: I was percolating the book, ok... I don't just think about this stuff for fun... ok, maybe a little...)


and the bus is just packed full of tired, murmuring, and late-winter dirty people, clutching their backpacks and suitcases, all of them sunk down in their seats, or standing in the aisles and swaying with the bus's motion... When out of nowhere, some ragged moron suddenly dashes across the street, pell-mell and right in front of the bus, lit up and flailing for a split second in the bus's headlights. The Driver slams on the brakes, people cry out in shock and fear.


Nothing happens.

The idiot goes running off into the night where he, most likely, died in some ridiculous manner and then the bus just goes on and I eventually end up at the comic book store (Yay!). BUT... I wrote it all down, lines of quick scribbles, something about Refugees, crammed into a bus and driving through the desolate night and then running over some screaming madman (zombie) and the pieces of that and the other two reasons, the whole of it all... they just started to fit together.

And now I'm written a book.

So, long story short (too late), pay attention out there, folks, because you never know when you might see something awesome...

Character Origins – where do they come from?

Some authors base their characters on people they know. In general this method (so far) has not been my habit. I do get requests from acquaintances saying (usually jokingly) “Put me in your book!” with their reasons why this is a good idea. Not gonna happen. In general my characters tend to evolve over time, taking on a life of their own as I sit down and write about them.

Here is how a couple of my characters for BLACKHEART came into being:

Blackheart

Blackheart was born one day in the late 1990s as I was driving fast on a very crowded Interstate 35W in Minneapolis. I imagined (that’s what us writer-types do, don’tcha know) a horrible car wreck occurring complete with explosions and twisted metal that killed all involved—except for one dark, scarred man who climbed from the wreckage unscathed. I wanted to know—why, how, who was this dark figure that could walk from a fiery wreck untouched save for another series of scars added to his body? Thus Blackheart was born, the dark antihero who kept coming back time and time again in scene after scene as I wrote—whether I asked him to show up or not, who eventually became the engine that drives my book.

Clayton Jaeger, P.I.

I saw a documentary about an old surfer dude who went down to the California coast every morning and surfed to start his day. It made me think of a man, not an old surfer dude, but a sick, middle-aged private investigator, who had nothing left to live for—dying of cancer, twenty-something daughter recently killed, wife ready to leave him—who decides to go for one last surf and never come back. Instead of drowning he is saved by an angel—who gives him this decree, “Stop Blackheart.”

It is the meeting of these two stories that sets my book in motion.

Snow/Cold/Minnesota

At lunch with a friend discussing my book’s progress recently I was happy when she said, “Your book happens in Minnesota? Cool. I am so sick of every book I read and every movie I watch taking place in New York.” I couldn’t agree more. Setting my book in Minnesota makes perfect sense to me. It’s my primary example of “write what you know.” Having lived here for approximately 4 decades I’d like to believe I’ve noticed a thing or two about this state. For instance, it snows. In Blackheart there is blizzard that at times is only a backdrop for the story and at other times is one of the enemies my characters struggle against. The biggest challenge for me here is finding different ways to describe snow throughout the book. I understand the Inuit had 100 words for snow. My book contains at least 102. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)

Noel August

Fifteen-year-old Noel August travels with Blackheart and leads him to what he believes is the key to his immortal curse. She is a beautiful and troubled girl—her family murdered, speaking with guardian angels that only she can see and hear. I’m not exactly sure where Noel came from—but I personally know a number of people who claim to have seen angels—and at least one who claims to have conversed with them. To me the concept of seeing and hearing spiritual beings is fascinating—and Noel adds a wonderful counterbalance (I hope) to Blackheart’s darker side.

Resolutions

As the member of the Scribblerati who wrote the last blog entry for 2009 and now is writing the first blog entry for 2010 I thought it appropriate I at least comment on New Year’s Resolutions. In 2009 I had hoped to complete the third draft of my book—which I did on New Year’s Eve day. It made me happy.

However, that being said I still have much work to do on BLACKHEART before I try to put my book in front of agents and editors—my goal for sometime in 2010. I’m hoping revision 4 (and maybe even 5) goes more quickly. There is a writing conference I have my eye on this spring that claims to have “writer/agent speed dating" on the agenda—and I hope to be in that dating pool. Other than that I also just hope to write as much as possible and maybe even get a good start on book number 2.

Happy New Year—and for you writer/author types—happy writing.

Dead Man Writing

I’ve had a few close calls in my life, brushes with death if you will. All of these have happy endings, none of these left me with more than a few scuffs, bruises or in some cases a bit of lost skin or scratched bike or car paint. I’m sure you can say the same, being one hanging out with the living. These are dangerous times in a dangerous world after all. Here are a few of my close calls:

· Trout-fishing, the time the farmer’s prize bull was in the pasture with no fence between him and my fishing buddies and me. (Saved by the bull never actually choosing to charge us, just bawl and stomp as it followed us out of the pasture.)

· Just about run over by a very old, very large car in the alley behind the public library and the Jr. High (Saved by the catlike reflexes of the gray-haired woman peeking over the steering wheel. This was witnessed by an entire math class and resulted in a new school rule against this particular shortcut.)

· Opportunities to drown; Flooded Mississippi river during the mayfly hatch with a crumbling bank that left me neck deep in the swirling current; an exhausting swim with an injured arm in a tranquil gravel pit. (Saved by swimming lessons and my refusal to panic)

· Adventures in youthful ignorance combined with alcohol and a car that felt really good going 100mph on dark river roads. (Saved by? The grace of God? Bacchus? ?)

· Near-collision with a house-sized, orange, industrial dump truck, hauling ass out of a ditch in reverse, almost over the top of my Chevy Berretta. (Saved by my willingness to swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic rather than be flattened by the giant truck).

· Shooting range accident with a .44 caliber bullet fragment hitting me in the face (Per the doctor digging in my face at the time: saved by my steely chin vs. being hit an inch or two higher or lower in something softer and more bleedy.)

· A collapsing 35W bridge. Saved by my choice of the slow route heading to my class at the U of M that night. I ended up arriving in the area about 10 minutes after the bridge had fallen, one bridge over. I have no proof I would have ended up on the bridge had I taken 35W that night, but it would have been a close one.

There are many more incidents I could add to this list and probably many more that have happened I’m not even aware of where bad outcomes including death were a possibility. Didn’t I tell you it’s dangerous out there? As far as “Saved by” I could have also said in all these cases, “good luck, good timing, fate/destiny and/or guardian angel(s)” as the reason why I walked away and continued on living instead of the alternative. And hey, if I get to stay in the land of the living for a while longer, any of the above are good enough explanations for me.

This year the week of Thanksgiving I had my latest near death experience. Now, don’t get me wrong, this WASN’T one of those exciting near death experiences where I was clinically dead for a half hour, saw a tunnel of white light and my dear departed relatives beaconing to me, or fiery angels hovering over my hospital bed, no, none of that—this was routine surgery here in 2009 America (about 5% of us will have this surgery sometimes in our life; about 99.6% will survive it). My appendix in an enflamed fit of rage had decided to go bad and had to come out. Again, only a close call, a minor brush with death. As I was in the excellent care of a surgeon who I had been told had literally done over a thousand operations like mine, maybe this operation wasn’t even that—really nothing more dangerous than a drive on Interstate 494 during one of our Minnesota blizzards?

Yet—when I asked the kind resident prepping me for the operating room, “What are my other options besides surgery?” She replied as nicely as she could (and my recollection may be clouded by the morphine I was on at the time), “None. Left alone your appendix will probably rupture spilling infection and the contents of your digestive system into your abdomen resulting in eventual death.” Hey, I asked. As I was not in favor of the side effect, death, I signed the consent form for the surgery (which did listed DEATH as a possible side effect) and was wheeled off into the operating room. So I was never really close to death, was I? Yet, I have approximately 3 hours of missing time, under anesthesia with a breathing tube down my throat, where my body was not truly breathing only on it’s own. Not breathing for 3 hours could be construed by some people as death.

But everything worked out great, and I have no complaints about my experience. I was released from the hospital on happy pills (sleepy pills, really) the same day I was operated on. I had lunch that same day, I returned to work with a minor pain in my side one week later. All in all, I am quite pleased; dead man writing.

So that’s really my point here. I feel once again I’ve walked away from a close call and get to keep on doing what I like to do: living. I’m trying not to be too melodramatic here, but rather than dying of a burst appendix or a bad reaction to the anesthesia or a flubbed operation or…. I’m still walking, breathing, living, spending time with my friends and family, and writing. Yes. Writing. For a writer that is a big deal. After death I’ve heard you put out fewer pages. After death my 80%+ finished book would stay that way.

My favorite author Ray Bradbury has said, (and once again I’m paraphrasing, although this time, no morphine) that “time is the writer’s enemy” that “every book completed, every story finished is a way in which the writer can thumb his/her nose at death.” Sounds good to me. You’ll have to excuse me now. I’ve got a book to finish.

Digital Rights Throw Down

Looks like the inevitable digital rights clash between authors and publishers is unfolding before our eyes.

Things started to windup on Dec 9 when a couple of different publishing houses announced they were going to withhold publishing e-books until several months after the hardcover version had been released.

A few days ago, Stephen R. Covey said see ya to his longtime publisher Simon & Schuster and let the world know that he would had signed a three-year deal to move all of his e-book rights to Rosetta/Amazon.

Then Random House has declared they own the digital rights for all old contracts that do not specifically mention digital rights.  Sounds fishy?  This guy thinks so.


You can find an overview of the broader issues here.

In Praise of Time

"The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now..."

So starts Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, a novel written as though it were a text created within a new discipline: an archaeology of the future. It includes the record of the poetry, stories, lives, mythology, philosophy, religion...of a peoples who are not yet living. The 525 page novel also includes maps, over 100 pages of glossary and index materials, and, in a box set, even a cassette recording of the music and poetry of the Kesh.

A critique session or two ago, Claudia mentioned that she couldn't figure out the correct verb tense to use for a particular spot in her novel, because her main characters are time travelers. (They are also interesting, stubborn, hilarious, and sexy; you will want to get to know them, trust me.) Anyway, when I picked up Always Coming Home from the library shelves and, on reading the first line, put it immediately in my pile to check out.

They might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.

Oh yeah. It sounds a bit off. It stops your brain from continuing on the paths that it wants to go along. It catches you up. And suddenly you are thinking. About time and reality and how you fit in, and then you're just loving Ursula for what she's done to you.

Soon after I started reading the novel, a student in one of the philosophy classes I teach said, and I quote, "If I have to think about time travel right now, I think my head is going to explode."

Which I loved, because that's my job: getting students' heads to explode. Getting my own head to explode. I speak figuratively, of course.

At core, philosophy should be getting our brains to wake up from the ruts they so easily get stuck in and start seeing ourselves, other folk, and world (aka: Life, The Universe, and Everything) in new and startling ways.

And thinking about the mechanics and paradoxes of time travel is a lovely way to make your brain swivel inside your skull.

In my novel, which also includes some time travel, I'm attempting to uncover non-human understandings of time. How would Beryl (a bear disguised in human skin) understand time? How would a tree?

Thinking back on my years in philosophy, I can see the history that has led me to become the writer I am:

In an African philosophy course I took as an undergraduate, I learned that not everyone thinks of time linearly: my instructor, Ifeanye Menkiti, talked about how time in some African understandings includes a distant past, a present, and a near future, but no far future, instead the line of time bends backward from the present/near future toward the past, rather than continuing on indefinitely into the future.

In my dissertation I examined the work of James Hamill, who studied Navajo logic and some of the ways their system of reasoning differs from Western/European systems, precisely because they have a circular sense of time, while ours is linear. Which again, in my very limited understanding, might imply that there is no far future, the present always circling back to the past, the past circling back toward the future/present.

I'm currently teaching Simone de Beauvoir in my ethics class. Beauvoir is very suspicious of too tightly holding onto a project. We act unethically if we hold on so tightly that we are looking only at the far future of the project's realization, concentrating so hard on that end, an end so distant from ourselves, that the present means nothing, that the means we use to get to that end are completely subordinated to that end, that we do whatever it takes, sacrifice whomever it takes to get to the end. Instead she suggests that we concentrate on the near future.

How cool is all that? Pretty cool if you're a sci-fi loving, philosophy geek.

In my novel, I've taken what I've encountered in philosophy about time, and used it to figure out how time might be understood by the more-than-human world. Especially the spiders. They've just got to have a super-freaky understanding of time. My bet is that of all of us they're the ones who see time most clearly of all, what with all the eyes and the spinning.

But like Claudia, I have to think hard about how to communicate other species' understandings of time in a human language. In a critique session that is coming soon to a cafe near you, I'll find out how well The Sclibblerati think I've done with capturing the spiders... But as a preview it goes something like this:

I'll end as I started. I end as I start. I will end as I will start. I will have ended as I did once start. I would have started as I will be going to end.

No seriously, I really mean it. I'll end as I started: with a little Le Guin Wisdom:

"What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now."

How do you find your muse? (TMI)

How do you find your muse?

I think that's a question that plagues all artists. I think it's a safe bet to say that we all would like to be able to instantly tap into that creative center that drives our best work.  But, as we all well know, that doesn't usually happen.

In an effort to find Lady Muse, we end up doing all sorts of crazy things. We develop routines in the hope that repetition will entice her. We play tricks on ourselves. We pull out that one song that worked last time. We read something inspiring. 

And we hope that Lady Muse shows up.

So what do you do when she doesn't? Do you grind it out? Do you get frustrated and walk away?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, look no further. I'm here to tell you that I have found the magic formula for unlocking Lady Muse.

Now, if I were smart, I would hold on to this secret and use it to my advantage.  If I were smart, Lady Muse and I could go all the way to the big time. I could finish my never ending first novel, dive into the sequels, find myself on Oprah, host Iron Chef, and wind up the celebrity guest at a formal White House dinner.  (Yes, you are cute, Sasha.)

But I'm not smart. Well, I'm kinda smart, but mostly I'm just a Midwestern guy who’s too nice for his own good.

Yeah, I can hear your hearts pounding with anticipation. But I won't make you wait anymore. Here goes. My secret formula for unlocking Lady muse.

Step one: bang your head against your desk
Step two: walk away
Step three: repeat step one
Step four: eat, drink, be merry
And the magic ingredient: take a shower

A shower?

Yep, I'm serious folks. I don't know what it is about a shower, but Lady Muse sure does like it. And I know that's the magic ingredient because I've tried all the others by themselves and they don't work. For instance, I can't just walk away and come back, because I've tried that doesn’t do it. And it isn't the food or the drink because I really can't write well after an evening of debauchery. But the shower on top of all the rest? That's the ticket.

But here's what's weird. I can't just get in the shower, rinse off, and call it a day. No, the room has to be hot, and the hot water’s gotta be flowing, and – wait for it – I have to be washing my hair.  Yes, it seems that Lady Muse loves her some shampoo and I don't have the faintest idea why. Maybe she's a big Aveda fan. Or maybe, maybe she just likes those hot suds running down my neck and - TMI!

Whatever the reason, I'm just glad that I found the key to unlock Lady Muse because let me tell you, I come up with the coolest things when I'm washing my hair.