The Lonliness of the Long-winded Writer

If you ever decide to become a writer, expect to spend lots of time alone.

Writing is a very solitary process. Unless you are co-authoring something, writing is a one-person job. It's just you and your computer (or a pen and a writing tablet if you prefer to scribble long hand), and no one else. The story is, after all, coming from within you. Distractions are the hardest part. Seeing as how I'm no Barker or King, I don't have some island resort getaway to hole up in and churn out the words. I don't know that is what Clive or Stephen do, actually, I'm just sayin'... Me, I'm still a working stiff with a day job that has to put up with distractions, i.e., door-to-door solicitors, the neighbor's yappy little dog, loud passenger jets flying overhead. You know, life in pretty much any urban metropolis.

I'm luckier than most in the current economy and was able to afford a small home to call my own. I've set aside one room as my official "writing room" where I've set up my computer and will soon be turning part of it into a small research library. That is something else that I never factored into writing: Research. Seems that readers are more sophisticated than they used to be. Things have to actually be semi-factual or some people get all in a tizzy. I actually heard about an author who wrote in the intro to one of her books, (and I'm paraphrasing here), This is a work of fiction. I made all this stuff up. It probably isn't historically accurate, so don't write to me and bitch about it. Get a life and get over it.

The thing is, I prefer things to be as accurate as possible when I'm writing something. In my western novel, for example, I've done and continue to do research into the era in which it takes place. The reason being that you cannot mix eras and have the story be believable. You don't want to be writing a serious novel and have your Pony Express riders being chased down by a chopper gang on Harleys. It wouldn't make sense and readers would stop right there and chuck it in the garbage where it belongs. The same thing doesn't necessarily hold true for sci-fi, horror, or fantasy, though. In those genres, readers kind of expect the extraordinary and are more forgiving, than say, someone reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Even so, when I'm writing a zombie story, I still want the details to be as accurate as possible. Why go to all the trouble and do the research? Because when the reader gets into the story, I feel that it makes it all that much more creepier when they can relate to the surroundings. You take an ordinary, everyday setting with which your readers are familiar, then add in zombies, ghouls, demons, etc. By having the setting as realistic as possible, the reader can put themselves in the protagonist's shoes, and experience it along with them. Could this happen to me? In my home?

That was the approach I took when writing The Measure of a Man: Make the setting as believable as possible, then bring on the monsters. Apparently it worked. It has now garnered more positive editorial reviews. The latest is from Creature Feature Tomb of Horror which said my tale "brings a fresh slant to the zombie trope with [a] well-drawn and chilling period tale of ocean-going ghouls."

So, writing isn't a social occupation where you can spend time in the company break room swapping lies over coffee and bagels with your coworkers. It is a solitary effort where you may spend hours or even days without so much as seeing another human, but it has its rewards. As a newly published author, it is cool to know that what I've written, something that came from my imagination while sitting in front of my computer and daydreaming, has thrilled and chilled complete strangers.

Beginnings

Life seems to have a mind of its own. You plan for this and you plan for that, but it does not always work out exactly the way you wanted. And often times, what you hadn't planned for turns out to be the right thing.

I never set out to be an author, but here I am with two short stories published, a novel in its third draft, and two novels on the back burner. Who is to blame for this? Well, I could blame the good Sisters of my parochial school or the Jesuit priests and lay teachers at my high school for giving me a good education. They did get me excited about reading, but they didn't push me towards writing. Putting pen to paper and getting it published was something that happened years after my formal education ended.

So how did I become a wordsmith / mercenary writer / word-slinger? I mostly blame it on two people: Chris Baty of NaNoWriMo, and Del Howison, owner of the horror book and gift store Dark Delicacies. Sure, I'd written a few things here and there, but nothing I'd ever have dared submit for publication. Then a few years ago I heard about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) - the Write a 50,000 Word Novel in 30 Days Challenge. I thought, How hard can it be?

Turns out it was a little more difficult than I'd initially anticipated. To come up with a complete novel with a minimum of 50k words in thirty days, that works out to roughly 1700 words per day you have to be cranking out. That's about 7 pages of writing, with 250 words per page. When you're not used to writing much beyond a typical email to family and friends, that is a lot. So you pretty much need to get a caffeine IV going to keep pumping out the words.

Okay, so I decided to take the challenge, then what? Well, I couldn't just bang out 50k words of gobbledy-gook. What would be the point? I needed a story. Over lunch one day at work we got on the topic of people we knew who had weird or creepy names. One name was brought up that I thought was pretty cool, and the seed was planted. Based on that, I came up with a rough outline for a story. I had a beginning, an end, and a few plot points I wanted to hit along the way. I was set to go.

Come November 1st, NaNoWriMo began and I started slinging out the words. I was on my way! Then a funny thing happened - the story took on a life of its own. The characters and the main plot were there, but somehow the story started going where it wanted to go. I would finish writing several pages and think, Where the Hell did that come from? It was as though someone else had taken control of my body and I was just along for the ride.

In the midst of all this, I'd sometimes get stuck for what was to happen next in the story. When that took place, I'd save (and triple back up) what I'd been doing then take a long walk to clear out my mind. I also brought along a pen and a pocket-sized notebook in case any ideas came to me while I was out. On one such walk, the ideas came to me in a flood. I needed some place to sit and write it all down so I stopped at a favorite local haunt to have lunch. That's when I ran into Del. I was so engrossed in writing my notes I brushed past him without a word. "That's okay," he shouted sarcastically across the room, "just ignore me."

I finished scribbling down my thoughts then went back and talked to him. I explained what I was doing and Del's eyes lit up. "Two of the writers in my writers group are doing the same thing. We're having our monthly meeting tonight. Why don't you join us?"

That night I joined his group, The Dark Delicacies Writers Group. I found myself rubbing elbows with a talented group of authors whose genre of choice is horror. The funny thing was, I'd never written a horror story in my life.

By month's end I met the NaNo Challenge, and then some. When I submitted my manuscript for an official word count, I clocked in at over 65,000 words. But the story was nowhere close to being finished. I took a breather from the frenetic pace of NaNo-ing and tried my hand at writing short horror stories. I wrote one or two, but felt guilty that I hadn't truly finished my novel. I wrote a few more short horror pieces then went back to writing the novel. There are few things so gratifying as writing two simple words: The End

I did it. I wrote my first novel. I kept my beginning, middle, and end, and even worked in a few other plot twists along the way, and it all came together in the end. I took another break from the novel and wrote some more horror stories. One of them ended up in the 2nd issue of the horror e-zine Necrotic Tissue. My offering was Booty Call, a flash fiction piece that per the submission guidelines was to be exactly 100 words, including the title. My first published piece!

Since then I've been alternating between writing horror and editing my western novel. Yep, you read that right. The NaNo novel is a western set in pre-Civil War Missouri. Durning that time I proposed that we, as a group of writers, put out a collection of our works. A calling card if you will. It took time and patience, but the result is the horror anthology Midnight Walk. It has received rave reviews from Hellnotes, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Horror Drive-in, and Fatally Yours, among others.

My piece in this collection is The Measure of a Man, which has been singled out repeatedly by editorial reviewers. They've raved about it saying "...Tired as I am of zombies I was fully captivated by the vivid The Measure Of A Man, a superb story...", as well as it being "...absolutely fabulous...", "...very well written and a fine example of this type of story..." and it was twice picked out as one of the faves in the anthology.

So, I'm off and running in my writing career. I have one or two more horror stories I'm shopping around, but right now my main focus is editing my western novel. During a recent writers workshop I attended, one of the faculty there, a publisher, raved about it as possibly being this generation's Tom Sawyer. Those are big shoes to fill, so I have some work ahead of me. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to editing.