Hello to my faithful readers from “Conditional Reality,” “Marcel et Moi,” and “Terrastina and mazolli.” I have decided to consolidate all my blogging activities here. I’ll leave my other blogs up for historical and archival purposes, but I don’t expect to add anything more to them.
My current project is a novel about a couple of high school kids who fall into Flatland. Working title: 2D. I’m still in the planning stages, working through characters, plot points, and situations. In addition, I have two other novels that have been written and revised once each. Art Saves Lives is a near future tale about a family who is torn apart when they display what the government calls subversive pictures in their art gallery. The Last Giant is a fantasy tale about a valley inhabited by small people who are cared for by a community of giants who live in the hills overlooking the valley.
I’m not exactly sure what to do with these books now. I seem to have a psychological issue with reading them again. I think they may not be any good, and that’s blocking me from doing any work on them. It’s a problem that has plagued me all my writiting life. I’m great with putting in the daily stint of writing, but when I have a finished manuscript that needs rvising, I often freeze up. Maybe talking about it here will help me get past that.
Glad to see the new blog, and I hear you about the freezing up on longer manuscripts. There are a bunch of things which contribute to that for me, and I certainly don’t have a definite fix, but I know it helps to let go of perfectionism, finish a draft even if it’s super-drafty-full-of-holes, and put it into someone else’s hands (a good reader, though, not an armchair critic who’ll not be able to say why it’s working and why it’s not with a high degree of encouragement and interest).
(She says, most often not having been able to get to a point where it’s finished, and most often having a hard time finding people who can give decent feedback not motivated by their own baggage).
Cheering from here, and hoping you publish some collections of the quantum fiction on the side of the work on novels, too – love them so.
I wonder if a nice little success with a collection like that might build some steam for finishing the novels? For all that the writing itself is solitary, the grind of silence can, for me, self-perpetuate. My current stern lecture to myself is to give over a bunch of stuff to an agent who likes my work and wants to peddle it, concede once and for all that the self-marketing is just something I hate and am not good at, and that in order to do this, I need to finish some longer work.
I suspect that if I had someone saying ‘I can sell this if you expand here and cut here’ the revision would get much more straightforward and less based in my own internal ‘but it’s not finished!’ (because left to my own devices, it never is).
For what it’s worth, and perhaps not at all relevant.
I realize it’s not a touchy feely thing to say, Mario, but you are miles and miles better than most people publishing. You just are.
So, here’s to finding the bridges between what you already do and the people who can get it out into the world.
Plan to send ‘em out under pseudonyms. Separating the work from your identity can be very freeing. Sometimes I wish I’d made that choice.
The freezing up part comes from old childhood stuff, baggage left over from being an immigrant kid and never feeling like I belonged anywhere, the perpetual stranger. Somehow that translated into perpetually feeling like I didn’t have anything to say. So it’s been a fight just to find my own voice.
The quantum fiction, being so quick, circumvented all that stuff and allowed me to tell the story fast: bing, bang, and it was done: a complete work in miniature with no time for second thoughts. Now I just have to find a way to make the longer stuff work too.
Theriomorph, thanks for all your support, as always. I think you are spot on as far specific comments go. It’s much easier to take someone’s suggestions and implement them rather than continually wrestle with a piece, trying to find out what to do next with it.
Will, I like the idea of a pen name. I’m definitely considering it. By the way, the print version of T & M has an interview with me, conducted by a pseudonymous version of me. Now that was a lot of fun.