My plan is to Internet less this weekend, because I actually have a couple of deadlines. We’ll see how that turns out. As I learned back in Catholic school: the mind might be willing, but the flesh is weak.

Speaking of Catholic school, I figured I’d leave you all with this little story. It’s about the first story I ever sold. I made a hundred bucks on it - and in this day and age with semi-pro rates and all, that’s nothing to sneeze at. It’d cover my phone bill for a month.

Anyways, I went to two different high schools. The first was an all Boys’ Catholic School outside of Boston. The second was a coed boarding school in Connecticut. While I hated leaving the first, I thank God -- er, I mean the Formless Void at the Center of Existence -- that I did. If you’ve ever read Lord of the Flies you have a clear idea of what an all Boys’ Catholic School looks like on a day to day basis.

Boarding school was little better, but it certainly put a love of books into me. Of course when I first got there I hated it and spent much of my time in my room reading (Catch 22, Cannery Row, Iain Banks, or Kurt Vonnegut). I also built endless houses out of playing cards. I think this last thing terrified the other guys on my floor more than anything else.

With time my floor mates noticed my penchant for reading. In fact I’d see what their English classes assigned them and read those books, without even being in the class. To them, reading books meant I must be SMART, and since I was also terribly lonesome and wanted to fit in I wound up helping them with their English homework. And while I once took an issue of Penthouse, some ramen noodles, and a box of oatmeal cookies in payment, I mostly charged cold hard cash for my services.

I had a sliding scale for grades - twenty dollars for a passing C, thirty for a B, forty for a B+, and fifty bucks for an A.

Now there was this one guy on the floor who was doing absolutely abysmally in English class, and when the teacher assigned them all with writing an original short story, this guy knew he was in deep shit being the semi-literate that he was. So he came to me- the Book Guy. The story needed to be handed in on Monday, and it needed to be better than good. It needed to be great.

I doubled my rates.

I knew sooner or later my time as the “Book Guy” was going to come to an end. Either I’d get caught and suffer some punishment, or my own lousy grammar would catch up with me and business would dry up. I was determined to leave the cheating game at the top and put my heart and soul into this story. I wanted it to be OVER THE TOP.

Of course this guy, I’ll call him Jack, spent the weekend drinking beer, roaming about campus, and boasting about how he had the story assignment under control. It was no secret among the students that I was doing half the floors’ English homework, and Jack was a real twit in that jutting chin private school kind of way. Still, I didn’t care.

That weekend I scribbled and scribbled and scribbled again because my handwriting was lousy and I wanted to make sure Jack could copy it. The story was called “Emily’s Last Laugh”, and it was about an elderly woman in a senior citizen’s home. She convinces her nephew to smuggle in some automatic weapons and gives them out to the other senior citizens, and they stage a coup, and Emily breaks out and begins a career as a bank robber. At the end there was a big shoot-out in the parking lot of a 7-11, and Emily winds up dying in a flaming car wreck.

I suspect that if a high school student wrote such a thing now they’d be suspended and put under psychiatric evaluation.

But these were different times. Sunday night rolled around and Jack copied the story out and passed it in on Monday. Wednesday came and the teacher returned with the graded compositions. He stood before the class and said he had been impressed with most of the stories. However, one above all the others really shined. This turned out to be “Emily’s Last Stand” which he then read aloud in its entirety to the whole class.

God, Jack and I were hated. The other students knew full well who wrote that story and listened in sullen silence as my tale of mayhem and carnage got read to them. Jack beamed. He had got an A, while I got a hundred bucks and yelled at by a girl I had a crush on named Lisa who called me slime and an immoral snake.

Soon after that I retired and took up other criminal activities. Later when I had the same English teacher he made sure I worked my ass off. I suspect by then he had learned the truth, and he didn’t want me to think he’d be a push over when it came to passing grades.

See you all on Sunday.

More tales from the Good News Front. Sandra Kasturi, the poetry editor at Chiaroscuro (AKA ChiZine), notified me that my poem “Tourist” has been accepted for publication. It will likely be published in the October 2008 issue.

I’m thrilled with this sale, the third so far this year. The poem is a rather nasty bit of work based on my first trip to England (where I was doing doctoral research). Turning those experiences into art, and art that sold, is quite a kick. While I wrote lyrics as a musician, I rarely fool with poetry. Cracking into the notoriously tough ChiZine means a lot to me. Now to get a short story through their gates!

JSR

Pass the pipe, I think I'm a hobbit.

Out of commission with a sinus infection, though I am trying to get things done. Each writer has a journey of development that cannot be mapped out too far in advance, and each one is different. You can follow examples, you can plan, you can have goals. But the journey has no end state, no final destination until you bite the biscuit. As such, everything is a work in progress, with ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, and highs and lows.

Some writers never worry about their work and how it progresses. Others obsess over every detail. I think both can be harmful in the extremes. I’ve run from each pole and back again over a decade.

There are a handful of truths about this profession. Read a lot. Write a lot. Read outside your comfort zone. Experiment to grow. Learn from the masters. Follow your interests. Write the story only you can write. Etc. But one I need to hammer down is that my path and journey is my own beast. I can’t follow anyone else’s lodestar in terms of process or career. I can steal the bits I like perhaps, but I’m running my own race. For some reason, many writers (myself included), find this hard to feel. Rationally it is easy to swallow, but harder to get it into your marrow. We compare ourselves to others.

One of the best things about the Odyssey writing workshop was that Jeanne Cavelos wanted you to write the best stories only you could write. She had no interest in you becoming a carbon copy of someone else, or writing template fiction. Her compass for helping you do this through revision and critique is astounding. I try to hold on to those lessons and keep moving forward, reminding myself that for good or ill I best write my own stories and not compare myself to anyone else since no one else is trying to write my stories. Jeanne’s ethos is shared by Kate Wilhelm, the Grand Dame of Clarion, in her book Storyteller. I read this passage every now and then to keep my own compass steady in the wake of every writing post I read about production, sales, and critical praise that make me feel like I’m at a snail’s pace wading through ice cold molasses.

“Our students often worked furiously to try to keep up with one another in output, in reading, in playing and frequently failed. They were trying to work with the wrong rhythm. We reassured them as best we could. If another writer is comfortable writing a story a week, and you cannot do that, don’t fret. Take ten days, or two weeks, or whatever your personal schedule required. Some writers can finish a novel in three months; others need three years, even longer. They all have their own rhythms. You will find yours. You will deplete your well of inspiration and in its own time, it will refill and be ready for you to draw on again. There is little point in trying to force it to conform to a faster pace.” From Kate Wilhelm, Storyteller, Small Beer Press, pg. 154.

Such advice helps quell the fears and doubts that occasionally rise about what kind of writer one is becoming and helps keep your compass pointing strong in the direction of your interests and desires. Writing may have competive aspects, but at its core it is a one person dog and pony show.

Time to fill that damn well again. If you haven’t, read Steve and Melanie Tem’s The Man on the Ceiling. Brilliant.

JSR

I got another call from the Writers of the Future admin lady last week. I did not win First, Second, or Third Place among the eight Finalists selected in February. Matt Rotundo, a fellow Odyssey grad, won First Place, so congratulations to him! The admin lady did ask if they could hold onto my story for possible inclusion in the annual anthology as a Published Finalist. It will be a while until they make that decision, but I’m happy to have them consider my story.

Today during my lunch hour my coworker and I went to this wine shop that specializes in locally produced wines. While he searched for something to go with his evening repast, I browsed about a bit and found this: Doc's Draft Hard Apple Cider. I bought the framboise and split it with my lovely Lady as soon as I came home and, yeah, WOW!

If any of you like cider and live in the North East, I recommend trying it.

(The shop btw was down on the corner of Mercer and Spring.)

Beware of the nuclear family.

(with compliments to Rick Bowes)

I print rough drafts on the back of old manuscripts, as a way to reuse paper. Last month when I was down at my folks’ house, I brought back several packing boxes full of manuscripts from the unpublished spy novel I wrote senior year in high school / freshman year in college.

Wow–so much has changed since then. I found four or five full copies of the manuscript, the extras made by a copy shop. Many of them were in SASE envelopes sent back from publishers, several with brief comments. Nowadays of course, with laser printers most writers print their own full manuscripts; most send disposable copies instead of paying to get the whole thing sent back in a SASE; and big publishers don’t even take unsolicited subs, let alone hand-scrawl a note on the form rejection.

I also found eight or nine copies of the synopsis and sample chapters, and I read through bits of it all. So much has changed there too. :) The loose omni military-novel POV was pretty rough, the Sans-Serif font was hard to read, and my sample chapters were Ch. 2, Ch. 5, and Ch. 10.

I kept one full copy of everything for sentimentality’s sake, then stacked up the rest in my scrap paper pile. It’s taller than a five-ream box of printer paper, so I think I’ve got about 3000 sheets there. Which should keep me set for printing rough drafts for a long time!

Okay here’s the con report.

After work on Friday I met up with Andrea Kail and her husband and rode to Rye with the two of them. Conversation revolved around political scandal and impending financial ruin for others.

The con was fun, even if I didn’t go to many panels.

First was the Odyssey panel, which was in a shitty, hard to find room and more of a place for Odyssey grads to meet up with each other and hang with Jeanne Cavelos than anything else. Then I scooted up to an urban fantasy panel moderated by ellen_kushner, where I made the mistake of speaking during the Q&A and wound up rambling. Finally I went to a panel on “Mistakes Not to Make Early in your Career”. It should have been titled “How Not to be a Shit”. It was more about social etiquette than about how to avoid getting screwed over in contracts and stuff like that. Not that I'm complaining. Somedays all I have to do is open my mouth for my foot to wind up in it. Laura Anne Gilman (suricattus) moderated this one. She talked about working with editors and dealing with rewrite requests. Her advice was “Have an open mind, negotiate, and learn to make changes, but pick the hill you’re going to die on”.

Karl Kofoed was on this one too. He does this incredibly fun sci-fi “comic” for Heavy Metal that I've been meaning to pick up the collection of for years now. It’s basically National Geographic in the 30th century: Galactic Geographic. A book like this in a kid's hands would be a life changing event.

The rest of the time I roamed about with friends or explored the Dealers’ Room. In the end I only spent $20 when I could have EASILY spent over $60 - so I feel no guilt in my atheistic lapsed Catholic soul. No special dispensations are needed from the Pope despite my book ban, nor do I have to pound myself in the chest with a rock, Saint Jerome-style.

I hung around with most of the folks I see regularly at city readings and had a blast. I also met some folks who were astoundingly cool: Claudia Carlson and David J. Williams. Also, I have to thank my host, Barbara Campbell, who put me up for two nights. She (and her husband, Dave) were a blast to hang out with. Hopefully, I get to repay their kindness one day.

Overall, a fun con, full of that real con weirdness -- I’ll do it again next year.

Sickness and exhaustion and the need for some much due rest have thrown my writing into state of weirdness. I’m pretty goal driven but I know I need to take a break to be at my best. I realized that I had also not been reading a lot of fiction recently. So, I’m focusing on reading good stuff for the next little while, short stories and novels, to keep the imagination flexed and engaged as I plot out what I want to do next with stories. I just read Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emeralds” and loved it. I also just read Peter Straub’s Shadowland and was impressed but did not enjoy it as much as I wanted to. Craig Davidson’s “Rust and Bone” was brilliant but I haven’t enjoyed the rest of his stories in his recent collection as much. What joys and grumbles await me with Robert Butler, Ray Bradbury, and others? Only time will tell.

Stay tuned.

JSR