Selective Linear Thinking and Where I am on a Journey

I apologize for it being a while since my last post, but I'm going to get into why I've been out of the blogosphere for so long and then get into the main reason for this post; picking up where I left off with the status of Tempest Makers.

To be honest, I flaked out.

3 things happened.

One, I wanted to promote and self-publish by a certain date last year, and when that didn't happen I turned into a great big princess, took my toys and went home. I should have been looking at it from the perspective of an author and not attached to when and how it was published instead of purely (well, 98%) from the perspective of a tax write-off.

There's no passion in taxes.

All I had in my head were the words of the accountant. "If you have income from your writing, you can write off writing expenses." Writing income didn't show up and so no writing expenses to write off. After I stopped internally pouting and stomping I added up my writing expenses. They weren't really that high (Hell, they didn't even total $800).

So I got over myself.

Two, I reconnected with my writer friends at ConNooga this year. I have spent the last 3 years or so figuring out what I was going to do and how I was going to go about it. Between the 1^st year of recovering from the tons of information from the literary panels to finding a place within myself to do the work to be published, I appreciated that I understood the writers I admire had been where I am/was and were incredibly nice in answering my questions and giving advice. So this year I've recovered from my princess-drama wounds and I go to ConNooga. By the time the last day of Con rolls around I am reenergized and ready to self publish. Sitting in on panels and talking to a few writers, I have decided to speed up how I share this trilogy's universe to readers in simple and sincere ways.

The last thing that happened was during a conversation with my coaching accountability partner (I'm also a life and business coach). We were having a conversation about linear thinking. I felt rather boastful as I remarked how I just seem to not be stopped by things not happening a certain way because I've gotten use to things not happening in a 1-2-3 fashion. After the call, I realized I'd done the very thing I'd said I didn't do. But I don't come undone like that all the time.

I have selective linear thinking.

If I'm kind of neither-here-nor-there on something, and it's going 2-3-4-6 instead of 1-2-3-4-5, I'm not even fazed. But if it's something I've committed to, especially financially (I'm coming out of an ugly-bang phase with finances) or feel incredibly passionate about something and it take too long to get to 1 or the pace of going from 1 to 2 is "too slow" I tend to shut down.

I get it. I'm excited and I create this perfect scenario in my mind. But even I have to realize the Excitement Trains run on time to the Imagination Station of writing and not so much in the real world.

So after I got clear and re-energized, here we are.

And now to pick up where I left off.

The Apex Predatory Trilogy exists in an alternate-near-future universe. 

The first story, Tempest Makers, is set in the year 2030. Not only have we discovered we are not alone, but Earth has been inhabited by a race of beings known as Melovians for thousands of years. TM takes place after Earthlings and Melovians have discovered and returned to the Melovians' native planet. Think of Tempest Makers as if the characters and technology of James Cameron's Avatar landed on a less-hierarchical version of Arrakis (Frank Herbert's version of Dune not David Lynch's).

Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future heavily influenced what is going on technologically in trilogy. I also emailed my college Astronomy teacher, Physics professor Robert Marlowe at UT Chattanooga for questions on gravity, mass and other Astrophysics-type issues. I've never been committed to hard science, but I do want to have plausible suspension of disbelief with what I am writing.

Characters

I had a lot of fun coming up with names for my non-human characters. I have had the name "Ropo" on my brain since the 3^rd story in the trilogy was originally the 1^st story. As I began to flesh out TM as an anthology piece did Ropo (pronounced "Roh-poh") morph in Ropotoniskul ("Roh-poh-Tah-nish-kuhl) Mjodon (Myow-don).

Ropo was born and raised on Earth. Earth Melovian's physiology is different because of the difference in gravity, air quality and vegetation between the 2 planets (Melovia is a larger planet and has greater gravity). Ropo and his native Melovian kin have a reptilian appearance and both have 4 arms (Earth Melovians have hands. Native Melovians have claws.).

I would say that Ropo is learned but naïve.

Marcus Walkins is Ropo's human partner. Marcus is a little closer to being a warrior type to Ropo's paladin/knight. Marcus's fuse is shorter than Ropo's. The two have been on Melovia together for the past six months when the story begins.

I knew with a different world and how I wanted to pace the overall story arc, that this story would be relatively short. I've expanded it a little bit by adding 2 extra scenes (I'm working on the second one now).

My intention is to give you something to think about and I've always been a fan of thinking.

Have you had a "selective linear thinking" moment? What did you learn from it? Please leave a comment below.

Back Up 10 and Punt, Or, Bow to Your Shadow and Your Shadow Bows Back

November was a rough month. For a couple of reasons, I've decided to find a publishing house for the Apex Predator Trilogy.

I am the only one responsible for the path I walk and how I walk it.

I feel a mix of the typical huge-load-off-my-shoulders and the replenished energy that comes with it. The residual, weird defeat-guilt mix is going away, but I know I needed to feel how I was feeling so I could move forward.

I have so many stories rattling around in my brain, I can self-publish other stories later if I want to and I know other hybrid authors; authors who self publish and publish through a House, so I continue to have the support I need.

At 38, I have been thinking about the last 20 years of my life. Aside from big life events, the next 20 years will look roughly the same if I don't publish my stories. Don't get me wrong, I love my life and don't regret any of it because it's made me the awesome Empress Goddess Warrior before you.

I need to take larger leaps. I hallucinated the shackles on my feet.

I have learned and continue to learn many, priceless lessons.

I am ready for the next phase of my life.

In my next blog posts, I'm going to talk about the two major characters from Tempest Makers, give you some ideas of the universe I created and my thoughts on mixing magic and machines.

Let's have some fun, people.

Death Dealers

So one of my current bathroom reads is Talk of the Devil by Riccardo Orizio about his interviews with 7 dictators. My main motivation to read it is to help me breathe a bit more life into all of my antagonists, not just the ones in Tempest Makers.

Sometimes, when a story begins, the bad guy doesn't always start out as a bad guy.

I know you know this.

My interest in the evolution of a proper bad guy lie in the evolution of the character's psychology, whether it's the antagonist in question or the influenced society, environment, or universe the antagonist affects. Rumors and misinformation are huge catalysts to this evolution. This progression fascinates me because it's as subtle and varied as being born on a winter's day at sunrise in Buffalo, New York versus being born at sunset in the middle of a heatwave in Phoenix, Arizona. 

How many times has history sorted out and revealed just how "bad" or "not that bad" someone is. But it took time, and the distance of it to give us more of an unemotional look, when we're not hindered so much by what society thinks while the wound is still fresh and when, most, if not all, the "players" are either dead or politically impotent.

Sometimes you have to take a step back and take a deep breath.

On the other side of that same coin, I do so love a bad guy when you have no idea why he is So. Damn. Bad. An excellent example is Javier Bardem's character Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. You don't have time to wonder what happened in his life as to why he's so bad. There's no room or time for sympathy. He's just, flat out, unapologetic, and perfect at being bad.

We. Are. Superheroes. OR, How I Channel My Rage

I'm self-publishing Tempest Makers this year. I have a date in my head, but it's not set in stone until I can officially sort out the cover design, formatting, marketing, and finish with final editing.

But the point is I will self-publish a story by the end of the year.

When I realized I'd publish soon, the first emotion I felt was joy, followed by nausea, then relief (not relief from throwing up, because I didn't). The sense of knowing I'm so close to transferring my energy from this story to the next is invigorating.

It's said when you publish the first story, the rest fall out of your head and onto paper.

Yeah. I get that now.

DUH, I'm a little nervous, but I'm happy/surprised I'm taking this all so well. I'm pretty sure it's because I have a great source of writers who've successfully self-published and are happy to help me.

My choice to self-publish came after a lot of thought, but the reason most important to me was that I wanted to see if I could do it. I dated a guy several years ago, and he said he thought I was brilliant because instead of not knowing the answer to a question and going on with life not finding out the answer, I look for the answer. I was flattered because, 1, this guy was not one to freely give out ego boosters like that, and 2, I care about the Answer, whatever it is. I'm curious about it. I'd like to know________. When I know, I'll either look more into it, or tuck it away in the Random Crap File and maybe bring it up at a party, Gathering, or interview (Not as unprofessional as you may think.).

I guess I don't see a reason in slowing down my momentum or deciding now is a good time to put on rose-tinted glasses.

I understand being tired, and falling out of love with your writing, and getting into fights with it, and having an ugly cry because it hates you because you've read and/or edited the same line that feels like a zillion times, and you 2 take a break to "see other people," to come back and fall in love all over again.

If I do decide to publish with a House, I'll know what I'm doing. I'll understand the "guts" of promotion and working with others as a writer with an editor's perspective and if there is an issue with or question about promotions, formatting, cover design, etc., I'll be able to verbalize my needs in an intelligent way.

Is what I'm doing nuts? …Relative to what?

Is what I'm doing easy? Things are easier when you're prepared to be flexible. We didn't go to the moon because it was easy, and look at how much we know now. Look at how much is possible.

One of the most important reasons to publish at all was brought on by the catalyst of rage. Pure, bright, white, molten hot light of Rage. I'm not going to go into the origin story for the Rage. I'm focusing on what I did with it. To be fair and honest, I'm human (shocked, I know), and it took about 2 days to process the situation to where I was able to focus, but I knew in the early stages of the rage I needed—it was imperative—that I channel it in a positive way. My awareness was raised enough to know, the rage wasn't going to go away and I needed to do something with it. I reasoned with myself. I told myself, if I physically act on this rage, I'll end up arrested or dead. I had stories to publish, so getting arrested or dying would mess that up all to hell. Eventually, I calmed down, tweaked a scene, and it was a defining moment that added the right amount of conflict to Tempest Makers. The story went from "bubblegum" to "Yes. Yes, I just went there," especially compared to the next 2 stories where, now that I think about it, I'm going to have to make sure lighter scenes are added because of what has to be in those stories to allow for flow.

One foot in front of the other.

You are More Than a Vessel for Bad Pate´, OR, Brain Deconstructed

Full disclosure: You may have done, or are still doing, stupid stuff, but deep down, you are a smart person. Everyone has the potential to build a super collider, but some of us choose to put a paperclip in an electrical outlet.

***

Quite a lot has happened since my last post. The short version is I think I had a mental break down/upgrade/low-grade epiphany/self-exorcism kind of thing occur. While my brain reassembled, and writing struggled to come to me, it gave me time to get a more holistic view of what is going on in the world.

Wow. My timing is, and continues to be, impeccable.

This isn't my first trip Being Undone, so I feel a bit seasoned when it comes to falling apart and then coming back together again. It's just my version of picking myself up after falling. Everyone has their version. Some of us are professionals. The point is to Come Back Together [comments about Enlightenment redacted].

But I'm rambling.

I've noticed recently people seem to be overwhelmed (more so than usual). We're bombarded with so much information. Unless you know what is and isn't crap, you're getting it too fast powered by too much emotion to process it properly. Domino Effect- 40. Mob mentality-30. Common sense-15. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I've begun to actively seek information from sources that do not rely on over stimulating the senses to get attention. I've noticed the subtly of that tactic.

A large chunk of the beauty of what is emerging is that we are figuring things out. We are sorting out for ourselves what we do and do not deem okay, and we are getting there, not really on our own but On Our Own. You see someone touch a hot skillet, you learn that touching a hot skillet may not be a wise choice. You see another way to pick up a hot skillet. Hark! An oven mitt!

The key is education, and it's very simple. Everything has a history to give us context. Most of the time, the history is fascinating. For example, rarely does a war begin out of the blue with the first shot. A series of things led to the first blast.

If you had to place a label on my household, it is liberal [comments on the current political system redacted]. My husband read two biographies, one about Richard Nixon and the other on Barry Goldwater written by Rick Perlstein. My husband read the biographies because he wanted to understand the origins of the modern Republican Party so when he watches/reads/listens to the news he has a better idea of what the hell is going on with a portion of our political system. He's done this with other political, religious, social, etc. topics. My husband is a quiet, technological, hermit genius. He's cool like that.

One of the best things I've ever learned about not believing in something I learned from the 1st true nonconformist I'd ever met. He said (and I'm paraphrasing because it's been at least 15 years), 'I believe if you're not going to believe in something, you should read and understand why you don't believe in something before you choose not to believe in it. The same goes for believing in something.'

Watching all the beauty and horror in the world has helped me have an angle of perspective I didn't have a few weeks ago. Solutions show up in my consciousness. I think the joy and challenge for me, as it has been for other writers, is to take the clay and work it into stories for people who want to have a conversation and let the talk go where the talk goes. Sometimes the truth of reality is too much and to place it in a palatable medium of fiction makes the fact of real life easier to deal with when we're bombarded with "reality" TV [comments on Reality TV redacted].

More thoughts are sure to follow.

Like Somebody dumped Canterbury Tales all over a Modern Map, Part 1, Or, One Mother of an Opening Line

"I lost an arm on my last trip home."

Now that is how to start a story. I can't think of any other sentence that has such impact and meaning, and not be completely understood until The End.

So many questions.

It took a while to read Octavia Butler's Kindred, but I'm glad I did. Many parts of the story were hard to read. I found myself putting down the book, doing something, anything, else, before picking up the book again.

The story has so many layers of conflict, I don't know where to begin. I love the element of surprise, so I tend to be a stickler about spoilers. I'm trying to figure out how to talk about the novel's impact without giving anything away.

You know what's going to happen, but you don't really know.

It's taken me a while to attempt to "verbalize" how important this story is, and how it, in many ways, still resonates now as vibrantly as it did when it was first published.

Okay, I think what really stuck out for me were the relationships among the characters. It was like looking at a panoramic snap shot of ignorance-driven envy and it not being inauthentic. And not inauthentic from a historical point of view, as in, I wasn't there, how would I know, but not being inauthentic from the point of view of people treating each other like crap. It’s a matter of have and have-not. You-have-something-I-want-You-have-something-better-You-are-treated-better.

'Know anyone like this?

I think great stories are universal. The Universality is either very deep at the core or hovers just at the surface. I'm sure someone's already mentioned this. Great stories are the discussions that last long into the night, where there are agreements and agreements to disagree. Great stories are the maps that change from the medieval print of mythical beasts and personified clouds blowing winds toward exotic lands, to the time of Amerigo Vespucci, to any and all versions of Yugoslavia over that last 100 years. The same world. Different views.

I'm sure I'll touch on or around this topic again. But for now, this will have to do.

A Call to Action, Or, The Phone Book Fairies

An interesting thing has occurred for me. Well, a couple of interesting things.

I've heard back from 2 of my beta readers about Tempest Makers. Some of the observations they've made have me thinking, "Huh. I hadn't thought of that." Which, one, is part of the point of having beta readers, and, two, helps me understand the hundreds of plays and stories discussed in classrooms where the author had a certain set of ideas in mind and the reader "found" a few more, new ideas.

I hadn't really thought of Tempest Makers as being "subtle." I just write what comes to my head and sort it all out until it makes sense. Maybe I'm not adding enough emotional meaning to get worked up over it, or maybe I'm tired of freaking out over writing and so I'm effortlessly channeling any anxiety into writing. <shrugs> I dunno.

As I got over the hump of putting Tempest Makers out into the light, more ideas keep knocking at my consciousness, as if they are the people who come to your house to deliver your phone book. You open your door and there sits a phone book [esoteric trivia about ancient customs deleted].

This morning, I woke up to an idea that wasn't words but imagines, and for the most part continues to be images. I run them back through my memory to make sure I remember enough to jot them down in my notebook or draw a picture. When my brain is happy the images and pictures are enough, the mute button is switched off and I can hear some dialog; some of it "coherent," some of it not, yet.

It reminds me of an essay Neil Gaiman wrote about being asked where he gets his ideas. The essay is in Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy.

He says, "'I make them up,' I tell [people who ask]. 'Out of my head.'" He explains, "I don't know myself where the ideas come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they'll stop."

And you know, I think that makes absolute sense. I think if you have a spark of an idea, for me, it is the idea of Justice, and with a little bit of "glue and construction paper," and not stress over creating "something", your brain will have the space and power to come up with some pretty creative stuff.

I think the moral of this story is don't rush it. Have patience. A phone book will show up on your doorstep soon enough.