getting back in the ring

Short post today, rest assured.

Flying's been called off for the second day this week. There's a massive storm system deluging SoCal at the moment, including my neck of the desert. You've no notion how strange it is to have rain two days in a row out here, let alone the kind of downpour this has turned out to be. There was a whiz-bang thunder and lightning show last night, which my dad and I stood out on our front stoop and watched. The lights of the town completely disappeared behind fog and mist, and massive tongues of lightning tore open the sky and limned my little neighborhood with a garish lambency. Then the thunder came and pounded our eardrums into our skulls, just to let us know that the world hadn't quite ended...yet.

Anyway, I thought I'd use the extra time to get caught up on my writings. I'm letting the rejected "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" sit and stew awhile on the back burner. As for the four longer stories I have on my desk...well, I think I'll just finish 'em up as I see fit. Have fun with them, you know, and not get obsessed with making them subtle and perfect and sublime and meaningful. Then I'll let them sit awhile and come back to them and fix them later, see? It'll keep the process from becoming too much like work. That's the ticket.

The way I see it, I got into this literary stuff for the fun of it. So I ought to be having fun. I should just write what I want, when I want, when it occurs to me, and worry later about making it so that some editor somewhere will want it. (After I've finished writing it, for example.)

So it behooves me not to reject any ideas. If I get one, I should write it and see where it goes. If I judge every new idea by someone else's standards, I'll never get anywhere. Commercial writers like Robert E. Howard still managed to write some dang good fiction and have a shit-ton of fun doing it, despite writing for a specific market, or even a specific publisher.

My point? I've been stressing. Despite how non-negative the feedback I got from Fantasy & Science Fiction was, I've still been having a crisis.

Oh God, I've been rejected. I'll never be a good writer. I should shave my head and go live in an abbey and solve mysteries like Cadfael.

What in the name of hell's donkeys was I thinking? This story sucks canal water. It'll never get anywhere. Isaac Asimov would laugh me right off the street.

"Too obvious." Okay, my story's too obvious. I'd better go and check and see if my other stories are too obvious. Oh damn, they are. What'll I do? They're mostly written already. How am I going to inject meaning and subtlety into these wads of shallow drivel? I should just delete them off my laptop, run the disk defragmenter, and forget I ever wrote them.

Forget that noise. I just have to write what I like. You should write what you like, too. That's where the magic begins. I and ten thousand other writers endorsed this message. (If you don't believe me, Jade's got a marvelous article about it right here.)

To that end, I sat down at my computer last night and this morning and came up with two new ideas.

That's right, two. Two stories, buster. That's the way you get yourself back into the ring after a major letdown. Double-tap. Arsinoitherium-style. That's how I roll. 

And I've actually begun work on both stories, too. No outlines or anything. I'm just making it all up as I go, seeing how the plots develop. At least both stories have plot and subtlety as far as I can tell. Plus they're just dang fun to write. I don't have to worry about those troublesome things like research or realism or respectability or anything. All I have to do is sit up to the keyboard, let my imagination wander, and write a nice, clean, fun, wacky, character-driven story.

The titles are "Jonah and the Asteroid" and "It's a Jungle in Here."

(See, this is why I love science fiction. I can whip up stories with wacky titles like that and still be considered a legitimate writer. What a racket!)

One more thing: I solemnly promise, on pain of self-mutilation, that I'll finish telling you about my trip to England sometime before the year's out. I haven't even mentioned Scotland yet, and that just can't be missed. Plus I have a little vignette about the trip Miss H and I took to Joshua Tree National Park last weekend, and undoubtedly there'll be some more worthwhile flying stories as autumn comes on and the weather worsens.

Stay tuned.