Writing vs Everything Else

When does writing take over and everything else fall by the wayside?

My Latest Bout of Creativity-Induced Hermitobia*

For me, it happens when I am utterly inspired by my writing. The latest bout of intense creativity began around mid-October, and lasted until this very week when I finished the second draft of my latest novel.

For the past three months, I've done little to no online socializing or blog posting. In fact, I feel as if I am coming up out of a deep well. This well is perpetually replenished by a font of creativity, but it also blocks my view of the outer world unless I peer straight up at the sky.

Wow! What a pretty place I've been stuck inside!
Well by Sally.
Licensed under CC by 2.0.

Emerging From the Well

So what does it feel like to emerge from this well?

Well, life has gone on up above me, and I have to catch up. Did I know the primaries were beginning? No. Did I keep up with other writers, bloggers, artists and photographers I normally follow? Other than a few exceptions, no. Did I even read many books during the past three months? No!

However, I emerged, soaked from well-water, with a second draft of my newest novel (thankfully I have a waterproof laptop... all right, enough with this metaphor!). So my sojourn was worth it and more. I feel contented, and pleased, and ready to take on some new challenges while my beta readers have at it.

What does the future hold? I'll be working on my next novel, while at the same time doing a lot of interior painting and redecorating, hiking more, and gearing up for springtime.

Springtime Brings Yet Another Chance to Create

Springtime flowers already bloom in the desert of Arizona,
where we are staying now.

I feel like saying how I always greet the morning, "Hello, world!" And I'll add, "It's nice to be back among the real world for a while, until I hop back inside my deep well!"

*Hermitobia: Hermit-like behavior periodically exhibited by a person so intent upon her or his chosen task that the rest of the world falls by the wayside.

Thoughts on Holidays and Their Meaning in My Fiction

It's the beginning of the holiday season!

My calendar is stuffed at this time of year by holidays. My husband's early October birthday, Canadian Thanksgiving (due to my Quebecoise heritage and the fact that every year should contain at least two Thanksgivings), Halloween, American Thanksgiving, Winter Solstice, Christmas and New Year's Eve/Day. Whew! Festivals are squished in there at the end of the calendar for us.

First of all, end-of-year sounds either correct or ridiculous weather-wise, depending upon where in the world you are. I grew up in Maine, where there's about 1.5 months of hot weather. The rest of the time it's either cool or downright frigid.

In my 20's, I moved to Southern California, where—to my shock—I found out that even Thanksgiving Day is not immune to 90F heat and blazing sunshine.

This put a big dampener in my excitement over the holiday season for the first few years after my move. A Thanksgiving without sweaters? A Christmas without a blizzard? Wha—

And then I thought of other people the world over. Things like Christmas or Hanukkah are date dependent, meaning that if people celebrate these days, they'll have totally different experiences if they live in, say, Sao Paulo or Adelaide than they would in Portland, ME or Reykjavik.

Now, this bias of my childhood was reinforced by the TV/film media, who always portray the holiday season as full of hot chocolate and mittens. This realization would probably not have taken someone living in Palm Beach so long, haha.

Then, as I became more intrigued by different celebrations, I learned that many cultures start their calendars in different seasons. Spring is a popular time to start the new year, as everything is renewing itself.

All this doesn't even touch on the fact that there are also many cultures that have completely different calendars, some going by the lunar calendar. My fantasy WIP main character comes from such a culture, and she has trouble with the solar calendar because of this.

This entire holiday realization didn't end there. Although I had been a storyteller and writer my entire life, it wasn't until my 20's that I truly became serious at my craft. All my research on holidays began to percolate in my brain, and what came out was a realization about the festival need in all cultures. Even the most stoic people need some sort of gathering, sharing, food-centric festival. This need seems to cross all borders. Any civilization or world I made up would need to include that human trait in it, or the world itself would feel hollow.

The fact is, though, that those calendar-centric holidays like American Thanksgiving and New Year's Day are artificial when transported to different locations. The real celebrations germinate from what the actual climate, food sources, religious affiliations and temperament of the culture are at the place where the holiday is being celebrated.

I love to make my own worlds as natural and as believable as they can be. One of the biggest ways is to invest them with their own natural rhythms. This is, to me, one of the best ways of sharing my own love of the strange, wonderful and expansive SF/F world with my readers.

Inspiring Women: Martha Wells, Fearless Author

This is a post in the series, Inspiring Women.

To kick off my new blog series, I've chosen someone who is and has been a big influence on my writing: Martha Wells.

Ms. Wells writes Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first published novel, The Element of Fire, is a total immersion into a new world and a kingdom called Ile-Rien. Her second novel, Death of the Necromancer (which was nominated for a Nebula) is set a few hundred years after her first novel.

These novels are brilliant in ways that I admire. Not only is Ms. Wells willing to relegate the characters of her first novel to mere murky figures of the past in her second novel, she is also willing to make difficult choices about the city, a-la Godzilla running rampant through your beautiful Sim City creation. In Death of the Necromancer, Ile-Rien is a mixture of new technology and stagnation. Not to mention a few of the characters who are odes to Sherlock Holmes characters, but I don't want to give too much away.

To round out the Ile-Rien saga, Ms. Wells wrote a trilogy that takes place several years after Death of the Necromancer. Talk about fearless, Ms. Wells is willing to bomb the city relentlessly and use it as a backdrop for a war that spans not just continents, but worlds. This trilogy is aptly named The Fall of Ile-Rien.

A rare still shot of the carnage the fearless Martha Wells wreaks in her fiction.

In between the Ile-Rien novels, Ms. Wells has written many stand-alone novels, all excellent, especially City of Bones.

In her newest series, Ms. Wells is fearless once again. She has created another new world, and one species in particular named the Raksura (the series is eponymous). It takes a masterful touch to write about a species so different from humans, and yet so compelling and relatable. Once again, I dislike giving too much away about any creative endeavor, so just let me say that one of the joys associated with reading about the Raksura is to see what customs they have that are wildly different than human customs. The Raksura are fascinatingly and satisfyingly alien, yet within that difference is a kernel of similarity.

Ms. Wells has a blog, and a website. She also tweets and her handle is @marthawells1.

As a fearless writer of Speculative Fiction, Ms. Wells' fiction is difficult to resist. Her style has inspired me to be more fearless in my own writing.

Author Martha Wells
Website
Blog
Twitter

Happenings

What's happening in my life

A new novel

I'm putting a few final flourishes on a new novel, to be published next week! It's a steampunk/gaslamp fantasy, entitled The Quays of Lac-Carge. More details to come soon.

Travel: My Inspiration

We're getting ready to go to Yosemite for about three weeks in October. Despite living in California for several years, I've not been to Yosemite yet. I'm so excited to see what other people rave about. I'm an avid hiker, although I definitely feel content to stand on terra firma to watch rock climbers ascend sheer cliffs.

This is a scene from one of my favorite hiking trail near Oak Glen, CA.
I hope to be seeing a lot of the russet California autumn colors soon.

Current writing

I'm currently working on two novels at the same time. I've never done this before, but it's really working out. One is a science fiction novel with lots of space travel, and the other is fantasy with an alternate history twist. In general, my writing is split pretty evenly between the two genres. In the past, when writing a fantasy novel I'd usually stop in the middle to write at least one science fiction short story, and vice versa.

Although some people who this happens to may say that they get tired of one genre and have to move to the other, I prefer to think of it as I love both so much that I can't stay away from either one for long.

This time, as I work on two novels at once, I'm finding it so motivating to be able to go from one to the other. As of right now, though, I'm really going strong on the science fiction novel, and if it continues as it's going now I'll finish it before I return to the fantasy novel.

Ephemera: Where the Story Begins

The germination of story—where does it begin?

How does your story come to you? Does it gallop in out of nowhere?

Hangaku Gozen by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Does it begin with an image, a flash of insight, a half-remembered dream?

Viking Woman Warrior by Hans Splinter.
Licensed under CC by 2.0. Cropped from original.

Does it begin when you are passionate, relaxed, ecstatic, miserable?

Does this describe your mood when you've thought of a new story idea?

These are most common ways that the magic of story germination happens for me:

• A storyline stays in my conscious mind from a dream or a half-dream

• A complex idea pops into my relaxed, contented mind, seemingly from nowhere

• A striking image will inspire a character or a situation

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the story J.K. Rowling tells of how Harry Potter popped, fully formed, into her mind. That's the magic of inspiration at work, one which built a real-world story empire.

All of these flashes or situations need narration built upon them, which becomes the conscious mind's work. After I've received these inspirations, I love to let them germinate in my mind for a few days before I even write them down. While they're still thoughts in my head, I feel like the story has infinite possibilities. Writing the words down seem like they take on a permanence that concretizes them into a certain shape.

I can explain how I get inspiration. Yet, these flashes of inspiration themselves are the magic—the ephemera, if you will—that is inexplicable. It's the unconscious mind at work in ways that we can never predict or control.

I'd love to hear about how your story germinations take place.

Small Challenges

Why Challenging Other Writers Can Be Great For Productivity

WiFi at Moulin de la Galette by Mike Licht.
 Licensed under CC by 2.0. Thought bubble added to original.

Are you in the middle of a project (or even at the beginning of one) and you just can't seem to get yourself into a writing groove?

Enlist your writing friends to help by challenging them to a word-count goal! Say, 1,000 words per day for one week, or perhaps 2 hours of editing time per day... whatever works for your project and your schedule.

Not only will you have the edge of competitiveness added to your work, but you will also have your friend's support and encouragement as you proceed in the challenge.

This can even work cross-discipline, as in, you don't have to both be writers. You can have a goal of 1,000 words per day, and your artist friend can commit to work on her painting for 1 hour per day. Anything goes in the search for inspiration.

Over the past few weeks, I've been distracted by vacation and visiting relatives. To combat my dwindling writing production, I challenged one of my friends. Both of us committed to write 1,000 words a day for one week. We're both doing great. The best part? I'm going to count this blog post as part of my daily word count!

But, you say, what if you're in the middle of a creative person's desert? If you're the only writer you know IRL, you can always find a community of writers online. Try such sites as WritersCafe or Goodreads. Or you could always challenge yourself, and promise yourself a reward at the end of your successful challenge.

For most of us, a challenge will get our competitive nature going, and the more successful days strung together, the less willing we are to break that chain of success. Anything that spurs us to write is a good thing, and sometimes enlisting other writers is the best motivator of all.

Inspiration: It's Everywhere

These are some things that inspire my writing.

Reading

Reading and writing are inextricably linked for me

New books are always being written, thankfully. I am constantly amazed and gratified about how many books there are available in the English language. I feel happiest when I have at least 3 or 4 books in my queue that I am really excited about reading.

Sometimes reading a really great book will inspire my writing intensely.


Travel

Different locations are always inspiring. I love travel, and I love to put my characters into new situations and new landscapes. It's always interesting when they come across something they've never experienced. What will they do? They don't know, and neither do I most of the time!

From the oceans off the west coast of the U.S.A.... 

...to the red southwestern deserts...

...to the verdancy of the east...

...to the grandeur of old European cities, it's all inspiration for me.

After a childhood and early adulthood of no travel, over the last several years I have been lucky enough to have traveled quite a bit. Whenever I do, I keep a part of my mind aware and open for inspiration. It could be anything, from a building with interesting architecture, to someone with an interesting personality, to a grand landscape. Anything is fodder for me.


Fellow Book Lovers

Fellow book lovers unite!

Every time I can talk with someone about books (either virtually or in person) I feel great inspiration. There's nothing like finding a fellow book lover whose life is informed and enriched by fiction.


For me, inspiration can be found anywhere. These are three of my favorites. I'd love to hear about yours.