In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* The Hiatus Explained
* Of Interest
Quote of the Day
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” Mark Twain
The Hiatus Explained
To anyone who’s annoyed at my announcement yesterday that I’m taking a few days away from the Journal, sorry about that. In a way, your annoyance is a compliment, but I promise, my intention is to be away only temporary.
Oh, and to my mentoring students, I will still respond to you during this hiatus. No worries there at all.
I can’t tell you how much I regret having shuffled and/or deleted some of my neural pathways a little over a year ago. Before I did that, I was a shining example of what a fiction writer can accomplish when s/he trusts the characters to tell the story that they, not the writer, are living.
I was happily turning out a new 40-60,000 word novel every two weeks. Literally from the time my ‘work’ day ended, I looked forward to getting up the next morning and getting back to the Hovel to write another few thousand words.
Despite how this probably sounds, I’m not complaining. After all, I was stupid and/or naive enough to commit this sabotage on myself. I’m not afraid to admit stupidity and naivete when I commit it.
I’ve always considered myself somewhat intelligent, but only AFTER I’d done the deed did I learn that European research takes a vastly different and vastly broader look at the effects of nicotine, both bad AND good, than does the strongly biased propaganda-research of the good ol’ USA. I’m just sayin’, believe what you want, but don’t be a mushroom.
And now, I want to get my writing back. It’s as simple as that, and it’s long past time. But to do that, I have to change some habits I developed and rearrange some priorities I set when I wasn’t able to write fiction at all. For example, in order to keep writing something even if it wasn’t fiction, I made the Journal my main priority.
Even as I wrote Blackwell Ops 8, the test novel for my return to writing fiction, the Journal was my priority. As a result, on many days I didn’t write fiction at all.
This hiatus will enable me to reset my priorities and refocus my attention on writing fiction. I’m being selfish, but I want to get back to having fun. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy chatting to my friends, paying forward what I’ve learned, and passing along links to others’ posts that I think you might find interesting.
But if I can’t get back to the unbridled joy of conveying my characters’ stories, there’s really no purpose to the Journal. I can’t preach what I’m not practicing. So I’ll take the time necessary to reset things to my version of normal. Probably no more than a few days.
Tomorrow I’ll share a response I sent this morning to one of my mentoring students. It’s already written so I only have to copy and paste it, then schedule the post to release tomorrow morning. The tidbits in it are varied enough that I’m able to at least hope it will help some of you along your journey.
Talk with you “live” again soon.
Of Interest
See “Mountweazels and More!” at https://killzoneblog.com/2022/08/mountweazels-and-more.html.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 540 words
Writing of (novel, tentative title)
Day 1…… XXXX words. Total words to date…… XXXXX
Total fiction words for August……… 13935
Total fiction words for the year………… 66431
Total nonfiction words for August… 20490
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 126730
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 193161
Calendar Year 2022 Novels to Date…………………… 1
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… 0
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 67
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31
Disclaimer: Along with discussing various aspects of the writing craft, I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. WITD is “the only way” to write, but it is by far the easiest, most liberating, and most fun.