The easiest form of travel

It's been a bit of a challenge the past couple of months, and though it feels incomprehensibly hard to write this all out, if I'm going to pretend to be a writer, this means I have to write the hard stuff as well as the fun stuff.

I wrote a series of six books - the Chronicles of Aesirium - which were, in effect, a young adult mythology about death. Main character? Angel of Death. Do characters die? Oh hell yes. Six books, and in all that time, I never experienced it directly. Not really. I used to work in a hotel, years ago, and during that time I had to identify two deceased persons to the authorities. Peripherally, yes. Death was everywhere, but.... I don't know. It just wasn't the same, really.

At the end of last year, my father passed away. Long illness, we kind of knew it was coming, and yet... I woke up one morning into a world where the man who helped me come into this world was no longer alive. It's been a couple of months, now, and I still wrestle with wrapping my stupid brain around that reality. I can't just call him up on the phone, I can't hop on a plane to go see him. He's gone. He won't talk to me, he won't make those bad Dad jokes or tell me those stories that made him such a fascinating human being. The thoughts and experiences of his life are gone. Gone.

Even writing that is just a struggle. I really want to just erase all of that, pretend it's not real and shut my laptop so I can't accidentally write it again.

It's a hole in my existence, the likes of which I've never before understood. I feel like I should reach out to every person I have ever known who has lost someone close to them and apologize for every pretending like I understood their pain. There's just.... well, there's practically no way of knowing, really, until you have that same hole in you.

Everything takes me back to the times I've spent with my father. Television shows (seriously, there are SO MANY SHOWS WITH DEAD PARENTS THAT I CANT EVEN) and movies, books - my memories are triggered by things that should have no superficial connection, and yet, there they are. Conversations about gun laws - hell, any political debate in question reminds me that it's one of the things my dad and I could absolutely NOT discuss - history (my dad was a voracious fan of history, specifically american history, and specifically the wild west era of american history), building things, fixing things, driving things. My dad was a tinker, and you could spend a week in his shop and never even scrape the surface of his projects.

The odd reality is that my dad's timeline, for the first time ever, has an end date. 1941 - 2017. Imagine that. Like, if I want to talk to him again, I have to go BACK IN TIME to do that.

Granted, to a certain extent, there is a very easy way to do that - through my memories of him. A thousand conversations, hugs, laughs, adventures - - those are time-locked. They happened. I can return to them whenever I want; I can go back and see those, hear those, feel those.

Memories are the easiest form of travel. But today... the price to take that trip is still pretty high.

Fear of the Blank Page

It’s a common observation for a lot of writers to stare into the emptiness of a fresh sheet of paper, and feel that momentary prick of terror: will I fill this? Will the words appear? Or, worse yet, will the page be filled, but with utter crap? I know this fear pretty well. It’s not really papyrophobia, and not really hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, and maybe it’s a form of agoraphobia, but all in total it feels like a decidedly tangible intangible.

There was a brief time in my college years where I flirted with the notion of acting. I even got the lead in a community performance of “Bell, Book and Candle”, and regardless of how many weeks the show ran, there was a moment each night where I stood behind the door facade and waited for my queue where I felt the stark panic of “oh my god, what’s my line?”

I think I actually did forget the line once, but other than that, the words fell out each time the door opened. It felt a bit more like skydiving (I assume), because all too often I was mostly just hanging on for dear life and praying that I wouldn’t screw up the show for the rest of the cast or the director. It was sheer terror each night, but I just kept coming back and strapping in for each performance. We all have our adrenaline rushes, maybe. Getting up on stage has always been that for me, whether as an actor, a musician, or, now, as a writer.

But that’s a rush I have had decades to appreciate, and savor the thrill like a finely aged whiskey. It’s got a kick, followed by that warm glow that reaches down to toes and fingertips; a familiar sensation that triggers all manner of emotions and memories.

That, however, is a different sort of emotional ride than the blank page. Every time I sit down to write, I feel that familiar pang of dread that threatens to throw me off my storytelling and bury myself in a book, a video game, a rerun on Disney+, whatever the case may be. It happens to me, and I know it happens to many of you as well. The blank page tries to taunt me, like the French knights at the top of the towers in Monty Python. It would definitely catapult cows at me if they had the stock to spare, that’s for certain. And since I’m fresh out of large wooden badgers, I don’t usually know quite how to respond.

One day, though, it hit me.

It’s not a blank page. It’s not destined to be a permanently immovable void, free from letters and sentences and stories. It’s not a fixed point. It just is not that.

The page is an untraveled road, stretching out to the horizon. It is an uncharted ocean. Pristine and freshly fallen snow, wishing for snow angels and witty snowmen (or snow people - my fields are free from gender expectations). My pages are the sky, and those clouds can look like bunny rabbits or steam-powered airships if I think they do, right?

I can remember starting on “Reaper’s Return”, lo those many years ago. The concept seemed monumental. A book about an 11 year old girl who becomes an angel of death? Ridiculous! And the full series - six books?? What was I thinking? And short stories? Collections? Stories about a dark Peter Pan? A robot apocalypse emerging from customer service and live robot music? More novels in the Reaper’s Return universe? Seriously, if I were a sane human, I’d never have even started that nonsense, right?

But, yeah, I guess it’s good that I didn’t opt for reason. That’s how new things get made, you know? Getting off the road and making your own path, building on the wisdom of those who went before and putting your personal spin on it. At this point, I can look back on the million or so words I’ve put on pages, and at least extrapolate that maybe I can keep filling up more of these endlessly vacant spaces with more ideas and new stories. I’ve got a few new additions to my “to do” list, some of which I’m already working on, but several that remain in the “next on deck” folder.

So, what about you? What are you working on? What project do you think is an insurmountable opposition? An unclimbable mountain? An unstoppable force?

Because I’ve got news for you: you - YOU - are the unstoppable force. You are the insurmountable opposition. You are the mountain. You are the ocean.

You are the open road, and the horizon is right there, just off in the distance. Can you see it? Can you feel that sun and breeze upon your face? Can you count the stars? Can you make the snow angels?

Of course you can.

We all can.

So what are you waiting for?

Once Upon a Solstice

For most of my life I have considered the solstice to be a moment to celebrate hope, depicted by the slow return of the sun to winter's long nights. Feeling the bright warmth of the return of spring always seemed like an aspirational expectation. It was just how it seemed to me, I suppose: warmth = good, cold = bad.

Maybe it's just age or its accumulation of experience, I don't know. But now I look at this eve of shadows, and feel both a rising pull towards the returning hours of sunlight, but a moment's stillness for the dwindling of the night.

Sunlight, moonlight, starlight; songs and silence. Both are notes upon the melodies that flutter through my heart, and I cherish them both. I no longer seem to feel an unfettered draw towards either one in particular, I love them both. They each are possessed of unique benefits and challenges, while we are buoyed aloft between them both - like a planet caught between orbit and rotation, satellites and sunlight. A steady and undeniable gravitational dance, hither and yon.

Too much of a thing, I suppose, yes? One element provides, and also provides a harmony and appreciation for the other. Not as opposition, but a renewed respect and perspective for what might otherwise seem the mirrored image.

I don’t quite know why I feel such a poetic response to this day, this year more than most. There’s an otherwise quiet reflecting in my mind this year, and to be honest I’m grateful for the relative silence I’ve encountered after several years of chaos and the surrounding madness of rage that years of global miscommunication have engendered.

And that has reminded me of just why it is I write. What has driven me to put metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper all these years, why I have always been pushed to take in the sworl and gyre of the stars and draw them into whatever pantheons they might belong. Maybe it’s just all fables and mythologies, but perhaps that is just the root of it? MCU Thor did once say “all words are made up”, and I guess there’s some solace in that. All paths come from faith, all faith comes from hope, all hope comes from a choice. It’s a sentiment, yes, but this is a season of sentiments, isn’t it?

Anyway. As this is that season, I choose to accept the night and the day, and look to the seasonal shifts as the mile markers they provide along this highway I walk: neither good nor ill but as choice makes them so.

And to you, dear friends, dear readers, I want to thank you for joining me along this path. I hope that these coming seasons fill your hearts and minds with comforting tales and happy beginnings, or of truly resolved and resolving endings, should the case there be. Be well, fellow travelers. Be merry. Be at peace.

New stories await us all.

Why Do we Write? part 2

It occurred to me that, in all my rush to confess the sometimes-overwhelming cloud of self-doubt and anxiety involved with trying to be any kind of artist, I did neglect to add the last little bit of it.

Because, yeah, putting yourself out there, getting on stage, setting what you’ve done up into a spotlight for all to see… well, yes, it’s terrifying. There are always going to be people waiting for the opportunity to pounce on Those Who Do, for no other reason than because They Do Not. A show just got recognized recently - “Ted Lasso” - and for one brief moment, everyone was celebrating the shared experience of being moved by this project. But of course, then comes the armchair critics - and I use the term “critic” pretty loosely, because frankly those people never did a single creative thing in their lives and thus lack even the most basic qualities of critical evaluation. And this isn’t a surprise - it’s always been easier to destroy than to create. Learned that in a movie, and you get a nickel if you can tell me what movie it’s from.

I was in a writing session with an enormously talented friend of mine just this morning and we were talking about this whole process of recognizing and coping with self-doubt, and it became obvious that this one final kernel was missing from my blog. I did address why it is so difficult to write, but I didn’t spend enough time talking about why we try to do it in the first place.

Why DO we put ourselves out there? Why DO we write these stories? Why subject ourselves to the inevitable condemnation or, worse, oversight and isolation of artistic creation? I gotta be honest, one of the worst things I’ve ever been told at any shows I’ve attended was when a fairly successful author (I won’t say their name because I don’t think they realized how much their statement hurt me at the time) looked over all my books and, after talking to me at length about the whole process, said, “Honestly, how have I never heard of you??”

I didn’t have a good answer for them at the time, and I probably still don’t. Why hadn’t they heard of me? Well, I don’t have a publicist, so maybe that’s part of it. But it also touched on my personal hell, which is that I believe it’s easier to be insulted than to be ignored.

But anyway - again, why do I do it? Do I want to be the next J K Rowling? Not really, she’s got some baggage to deal with that I’d never want. I wouldn’t hate her money, but I’d be happy with, like, a tenth of it, I guess. But that’s also not why I do this.

Do I want crowds of cheering fans? Adulation? Nope. That would be…awkward. I do kind of miss audiences, though - it’s an enormous sense of validation to play a song and get applause at the end of it, and you don’t generally get that as a writer. From time to time on panels or signings, yes, but it’s not on the same page of being an actor or a musician, and again, awkward.

So here’s the reason, and I’ve quoted this before so forgive me when I do so again:

“Many people look at the world as it is and ask, Why? While I prefer to imagine the world as it could be, and ask, Why Not?” (paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw)

I grew up with shows like the Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Star Wars, the Outer Limits. I read Tolkien, Dragonlance, Earth Abides, Neuromancer, and also studied philosophical tomes like The Prophet and the Celestine Prophecy. I took apart religious texts and analyzed humanity’s path from its origins through a thousand world events which should have either prevented our emergence or stifled it entirely. We’re a band of rebellious nomads on a blue speck on one edge of a galaxy that might not have even noticed us. And even now we seem to teeter on the brink of self-annihilation. Here’s a fun little game of nihilistic bliss: imagine how the world will end!

Seriously, I do that, like, all the time. I’ve written an entire novel on the robot revolution, but I’m just not yet ready to publish it, mostly because we keep skipping through the minefields and it’s hard as hell to write about the end of the world when it’s entirely possible we might decide to jump off a different cliff than we’d originally intended.

At the same time, it was Star Trek Day yesterday.

Star Trek… ah, I’m so grateful my father got me watching that show at a young and impressionable age. Forget Kirk and his intergalactic machismo, all of that other stuff aside, it was a bold and courageous implication that we might actually overcome the odds and go out into that final frontier. And Space isn’t the actual literal frontier, though the metaphor holds true with the tales of the wild west of early Americana. But the deeper promise is one that seeps into the spaces in between all my words and in each of my stories.

Why do I write? It’s because I believe that we’re not actually as without hope as we often think ourselves to be. We can do powerful things. We can invent wonders. We can surpass our expectations. We can boldly go out into the unknown and beyond, and we can even overcome our own worst intentions. We can be selfless. We can be magical. We can. WE CAN.

That’s what I write. I write stories of hope, of imagination, of small heroes who overcome the odds and in spite of the wounds they take along the way, rise and succeed.

We are, in point of fact and fiction, better than we know. But sometimes we forget. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. Some days, it’s all we can do to crawl out of bed and face the new side quests the world has waiting for us. Sometimes, we just find ourselves too tired, too sad, too angry, too exhausted to hope. To believe. To take in that next breath in defiance of the odds.

Well, to quote our good friend Han Solo, never tell me the odds.

Because we have a history to understand, and a future to create.

Who’s with me?

Why Do We Write?

“I’m not good enough.”

“None of my ideas are very creative.”

“Maybe I should just get a real job.”

“Nobody wants to read my stuff.”

It would be so much easier if Imposter Syndrome wasn’t a thing, you know? Imagine that world for a moment. Where you could just write, sing, play, dance, act, paint - whatever it is that you really want to do for a mode of self-expression - without the burden of self-doubt. Not only have I seen this from pretty much all my creative friends and peers, but I deal with this myself.

A while back my publisher asked me to answer this question: “Why should someone read my books?” And… my brain utterly shut down. I wrestled with finding the answer and in the end never really found a response that I felt good about. On the one hand, three cheers for modesty, but on the other hand, yeah, this is why people hire publicists, right?

sigh

Some truth, now. Serious truths.

At the risk of making some sort of “snowflake” metaphor (by which I mean how it was used years before being tainted into an insult), everyone is unique. Like a fingerprint, our combination of experiences and core personalities make us specific and different than any one other person. Yes, we have commonalities here and there, but the particular mosaic that makes any one person who they are is possessed of the sort of specificity reserved for, well, yes, snowflakes. You do have a unique voice. An unmatched point of view, and individual manner of expression all your own.

From an artistic perspective, it’s that marriage of experiences and voice that makes the things you make all your own. There is nobody else who is going to create the same things you create.

That part isn’t too hard to perceive or accept, but I think the part that tends to bog us all down is the second part of our confidence - comparative evaluation. It stops being a matter of being unique and starts being a matter of “am I good enough?” Or, worse, “is everyone else better than me?”

This question is practically impossible to quantify, though. It’s one thing to analyze creative works in terms of composition, construction, design or technique, but it gets a bit dodgy when you start to apply volume (no, musicians, not THAT kind of volume). “Billions and billions served” doesn’t put McDonald’s on the same level as a three Michelin restaurant. Sure, it does make them loads of money, but that’s another conversation.

At the end of the day, the most significant judge of your art is, unfortunately, yourself. And I say “unfortunately”, because all too often we let our own critique condemn us, and stop ourselves in our tracks. We usually know better than anyone our own failings. We look at the things we’ve conjured up and see all the flaws and scars and missteps. Case in point: on an album I recorded, “Obsidian Bridges”, there are three specific moments on three different songs that I absolutely cannot listen to. My body tenses as the songs approach the respective offenses, and once the nauseating moments have passed, the lingering nausea of regret remains usually well into the middle of the next song. One of the songs was so brutal in my memory that I left it off the digital release and replaced it with another song entirely. Would I record the album again? No, of course not. It’s been twenty years and my musical voice has changed substantially. Different experiences, different ideas, and… well, I have to be honest here - part of my changed creatively ideology is where it is because I recorded that album. The successes and failures have contributed to what sorts of things I make now. And the same is true of my books. I look back through them (sometimes I forget what I wrote and have to remind myself - don’t judge me!) and I can see a lot of things I would now write differently.

Key word here: “now.”

Time evolves us. Sometimes, we evolve in the middle of our own projects. For example, the process of writing even the first draft of our first novel is a whole learning experience. By the time we get to “The End”, we’ve had just as much of an adventure as our characters. Something worth remembering when you go back to do your first pass of an edit. The first chapters are probably going to look awful, but that is normal. To paraphrase the delightful Neil Gaiman, the first draft is always going to be terrible, but the point of the edit it to make it look like you knew what you were doing all along. That’s when you get to put those lessons you acquired during the first draft onto the page.

That second pass is not a condemnation of your ability as a creator. It’s the way to buff out the imperfection every first draft is going to have; it’s the polish, it’s the shine. Here’s the thing you should recognize: if you’re able to see the flaws in your work, it means you have gotten better. It doesn’t mean you’re still the artist you were when you began it - it means you’ve leveled up.

Recognize that. Celebrate it. Play the victory music from Final Fantasy. Do a little dance. Give yourself a high five, run your victory lap.

In short, enjoy your moment. Every iteration can be a step forward.

You’re good enough. Don’t forget that.