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This is not a war, but it is a fight. Humanity is uniquely bonded through a single event as this. We are all affected. We are all at risk. So this is one time we truly are in it together. Everyone. So, love the people you love and maybe listen a little more to the people you don’t. We are going to get through this. Follow the scientists and the medical experts. This is what they do, this is their time. My best to everyone. Be safe, be smart, and be sane…as best as you can.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill

I have a map on my wall of my world I created back in 2008. I look at it and the several updated versions that I have tacked up around it every time I sit down to write. Every month I go to the bookstore and take a picture of where my books will one day go on the shelves. Ever since I caught the fire of writing in my soul, I have never stopped. I never will. I cannot imagine what I would do with myself if I did not write. It is the thing that wakes me up in the morning, most mornings. Sometimes it’s the need to pee, or that I have to get to work so I can continue paying for a roof and the comforts of a place to write.

Going months and months on end without hearing a single word from any agent that I have queried, or literary magazine or contest I’ve submitted to can be depressing. Tack on events such as: having your car keys, and your wallet stolen, your writing notebook stolen, (full of a year’s worth of ideas you wanted to keep), getting a rejection letter, having a bird poop on your head as you walk to your car in the morning, the coffee grinder breaking (that was almost the last straw) and being stung by a scorpion on the tip of your middle finger. Is the universe trying to tell me something there? All of these happened in seven days last month, starting the day before my birthday. No joke.

Note: people tried telling me that bird shit was good luck, but I remain skeptical.

Through a week of comical and not so funny happenings and all the other things that have happened in my life in the last few years, I write. As you do, as anyone who has the passion to do anything that has taken their hearts captive and won’t release them until we die. It is a beautiful thing, having that thing that drives you.  

Then sometimes, through all your swinging at the world you finally get a hit, you at last make a mark. Even if it’s just a little mark, only one that you can see if you look in the right light, you know you hit it and maybe that’s all you need. Back in April of this year, I submitted to a contest one of my favorite stories, The Wandering Oak. It’s a origin story of sorts for the main character in my first novel, Mother Made of Iron, for which I am still seeking representation. I got the news recently that The Wandering Oak finished in the “Top 2 percent,” and received Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future 3^rd Quarter 2019 Contest. The contest features writers from around the world and the anthology has been around for 35 years. Though my story is not being published in their anthology as they have finalists and semi-finalists to publish, I am posting it here on my website in the Fantasy & Other Fiction section. I hope you will read it and maybe even leave me a comment or two.

I got a hit! It’s not a big hit, but I can see it, and that’s enough to keep me going. Happy writing to everyone!

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”    – George Orwell

Being an unpublished writer is working two full time jobs and only getting paid for one. Add to that a couple of the following things: being part of a writer’s workshop and/or a writing friendship with someone who you share your work with, and they share theirs. The value of this is immeasurable. Writing is solitary work and sometimes you need to have your work looked at by someone you trust. So now, you have two full time jobs and a part time job, and again, you’re only getting paid for the one. (If you are being paid for your writing on the side, more power to you.)

Throw in your query submissions for the book you spent the last several years writing, rewriting, writing again, and then revising another time. Assuming you’re going for the traditional publishing route, you have to find literary agents to query. You have to research what they are looking for, what they like and don’t like. You have to write query letters tailored to each specific literary agent. Write a synopsis then, which is a one to two page description of every major happening in your book. You have to distill all six-hundred pages into one or two.  

Once you’ve done the above, you have to deal with the rejections. They will come if you’re lucky. Every one of us will get some rejections, but many agents you query will never, ever respond to you. It’s like offering your hopes and dreams to one of those machines with all the stuffed animals packed in and you have to lift them out with some impotent claw device. No matter how many quarters you put in you’ll never get that fucking stuffed hippo. Querying is another job.

Okay, so what? Every writer who ever wrote a book has gone through this right? Yep. I am not special and neither are you. This is what we signed up for this is the writer life.

So now, you’re working basically three full time jobs as a writer (not including your current writing project / short stories / outlining / drafting / brainstorming and researching for your next one). Then add maintaining a social life and relationships with friends. If you’re a parent, add one job per child. I have no children, but I’ve seen them up close, I’ve seen what parents have to do, at least enough to have an idea that it’s crazy. How anyone can be a parent and also write is miraculous, kudos to you. If you are a single parent and you’re working and writing, you should get a medal and you should probably stop reading this because your house may be on fire.

Add to all this the fact that nowadays if you’re an author or an aspiring one, you need a social media presence. You need a webpage and/or a blog. Agents want you to be known already. You have to have followers and friends and people who might potentially buy your book if it gets published. Maintaining a social media account can be exhausting. You find things you agree with and things you don’t, you find things that you never imagined anyone would broadcast and yet there they are. That’s the way it works now, as I’m sure you know. As it turns out, Twitter and Instagram are the top two social media platforms for writers.

Oh, don’t forget to read. Read as often and as much as you can. That’s crucial. We have to keep an eye on the competition right?   

Also, we need to exercise. Go out in nature, run, jump, and play and do something to burn off those extra calories and keep from dying too young. We can’t survive on coffee alone.

Okay, now add some tough times or some pain, or a surgery recovery, a death in the family, a resurgence of childhood trauma or whatever else life might have in store for you. Anxiety, loneliness, and depression over the aforementioned rejections all come with the territory; the other stuff is extra. Speaking of trauma, if you are afflicted with an incurable loyalty to a perennially doomed sports franchise, that takes time too.

Now, if you live in America and you tune into the news and are concerned about what’s happening you have to carve out time for that as well. It can be challenging to keep from getting derailed by the maniacal orange crusted hobgoblin who goes around starting fires everywhere he can just to see what will happen. Keeping up with the Trumpster fire and not sinking into despair is another part time job. But, if you’re a fan of the lunacy, well, I guess keep writing your manifesto. But do us all a favor and show it to someone before you do anything. Maybe take it to a writer’s workshop and get some feedback. Writing is thinking and vice versa, and it doesn’t hurt from time to time to consider a little revision.

Writers, whether we know it or not, and whether or not we embrace it, are the voice of our time. Some of us will be heard and some of us will not. Our duty is to write our part in the long and winding scripture of humanity. Regardless of your genre, if you write articles for a local magazine or political commentary, fantasy, erotica, horror, or good old-fashioned fiction, we are all a part of this world and our voices should be heard, at least by someone.  

“Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.”
― Zig Ziglar

I have a new respect for bloggers since I started writing for my website. It keeps me busy. Before, when I was writing my book I was more static, stationary in terms of where my writing mind was. Now, I have to be able to move from one thing to the other, be it writing about writing or working on a fantasy story or something else. As a blogger, I’m still “filling out” so to speak. I enjoy it, but the freedom of it can be daunting.

I spent so much time every day writing my novel, which I am pitching to literary agents that I rarely, if ever, peeked out of that world to write anything else. Now, a little over a year away from finishing the book and working to get it traditionally published, I have found new latitude to play with as far as writing goes. I think blogging, or at least attempting to, has improved my writing agility to some degree. It has given me better range.

Some days it feels like I’m typing my life into some great, yawning maw of obscurity. It’s a bit frightening. To think all the work you’ve done, all the time you’ve spent and words you’ve strung together over the years might be for nothing. It might be a tad dramatic to say as much, but I think the fear itself is legitimate. But isn’t this what every writer ever has had to go through? Is this not what I trained for? Am I not entertained?

I remember when I got my first rejection from a literary agent, I was telling a friend about it, and he said, “You’re in the game now.” He’s right. It took me a long time to get to that point, where I was ready to throw myself into this massive Thunderdome* of literary proportions, but here I am. “Two men enter, one man leaves?” No. It’s not that easy.

Writing is like being born or dying, you do it alone, and it’s painful. Querying though, that is something else entirely. Being a writer is a funny thing. You spend most of your time in your own head, up in the clouds or down in the dungeons but rarely with everyone else around you. Then, when you’re done putting what you’ve seen on paper, you have to become an outgoing introvert. You have to ask a stranger who has never been to your world to enter it, understand it, and be your champion.

The game has changed over the years, even in the years I’ve been writing, training, and honing my ability to get to this moment. I don’t know for certain if it’s better or worse, harder or easier, it’s just the way it is. One thing I am sure of though, is that it takes a certain kind of mettle to keep going. Whether it’s straight out bravado, confidence or insanity I don’t know. Whatever it is, I have it and so does everyone else who knows what I am talking about.

Fifty years ago, writers typed their manuscripts on a typewriter, had to go through them page by page, make their edits, and then retype it. When he was writing, On the Road, Jack Kerouac famously taped a string of pages together to feed into his typewriter so he could continuously work without stopping to put in a new page.

Back then, once the edits were done and their book was ready, the writer had to mail it to an editor (actually put the manuscript into an envelope, take it to the post office, and mail it.) There was no world wide web then. There were no bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. In those days, social media required people to be, well, social. You had to go places and meet people. Back then, there wasn’t anything but a newspaper, magazine or a book that would connect the minds of writers with the rest of the world. There was just a man or a woman in a room tip-tapping the keys and slapping ink on paper. Nowadays we can post content on our websites by phone. Back then, you had to physically go to a phone, not carry one around in your pocket.

Today, there are so many platforms to post your work, whether it is your writing, your art, or random thoughts and observations. It’s a great way to get your words out there and I am glad for it. I came a little late to the social media game though, and it is still an adjustment for me.

I wonder how well Shakespeare would have done with Twitter. He wouldn’t be able to send sonnets, he’d have to settle for haikus.

Shakespeare changed everything. He brought common English to the elites of the world and made it legitimate. He brought high art to the common folk. He united the people of the streets with the people of refined society and their lofty heights. He tied heaven to earth and now we all have the same language, though our economical demarcations remain.

How would the world be different if history’s great authors, poets and playwrights had social media? What would T.S. Elliot be like on Facebook? How about Van Gogh on Instagram? Had he been on social media, a man like Charles Bukowski might have ruled the world.

In today’s arena of self-published authors, it is a little intimidating trying to publish through the old ways. Getting an agent is not so simple. It certainly is not as easy as I had initially thought it would be. This has been quite the learning experience for me. Then, how often is something as easy as you thought it would be? I may have to self-publish. It is a thought that has occurred to me. I am still holding out for the traditional way, which is a testament either to my stubborn resolve or to a fear of the unknown. It’s still too early to tell.   

Every day on Twitter or Instagram, I see new notifications of authors who have published their novels and hold up their brand new, shiny books for all to see. There may be more writers in the world now than there has ever been, and that makes the Thunderdome decidedly more crowded. There’s more competition, more fellow writers vying for the page. That makes it harder, yes, and easier for my voice to get lost in the clamoring cacophony of voices. That just means I have to be sharper, I have to be better than I was yesterday.

Writing is exercise for the soul. It can make you stronger, deeper and perhaps more fit to be human. In the end, having more writers ultimately makes for a richer world, and maybe that is enough.   

If you enjoy 80’s pop culture references and movies as much as I do, then click below for a treat. Thanks for reading! *Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Independence Day

“Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that matter.”

 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Around the world, about 225 countries have a day they claimed their sovereignty in one form or another. More than 160 of them celebrate that day annually. 243 years ago, America became an independent country. It was the rise of a new nation. We claimed our freedom from our English parent with the rousing words, “All men are created equal.”

All people are created equal, but they’re not all treated equal. That is true of the human condition the world over throughout all time. We have it all here. We are a country of contradictions. We fought for our freedom from an oppressive monarchy and wiped out the people who lived here before us. We enjoyed our freedom as we took it from others and forced them into slavery. In some states, men can marry men and women can marry women. All over the nation people of every creed, color or religion can work together, live together, love, hate the same things, and argue without killing one another, usually. We can get better though, and I believe even through these times we live in now, we will.

America is a great country. I believe that with all my heart, but I also know it tends to be greater if you’re white, if you’re male and if you’re heterosexual. Even greater if you’re rich.

We are a complicated people. As we celebrate our freedom today, little brown-skinned children, whose parents were seeking a better place for them to grow, rot in cages in Texas and Arizona. In some parts of this great nation, a woman who is raped must not only live with the terror of being raped, but the sentence of the life growing inside her. In America today, a man or woman of color who gets pulled over runs the risk of getting shot to death, even if they run away.

No heterosexual has ever had to hide that fact. No straight man has ever had to worry that his liking women would get him beat up, ostracized from his family, or murdered. People want to be free to determine the course of their own lives and to do so without fear.

America is a great country. I love it, but my love is not blind. We have problems. We are not perfect and what country ever is? Loving requires open eyes. We have been the hero at times, and at others, we have not. We are going through a tough time as a nation and it is at times such as these that we need to think about what we are doing, about what we are allowing. I love this country for all the things that it can be. I believe we can be better. We’re by far not the worst place in the world, but that shouldn’t stop us from improving. Yes, we can be great. If we don’t look at ourselves honestly, see where we were wrong in the past, and where we’re wrong now, then how can we even be good?

When the idea of something is greater than its reality, raise the reality to meet the idea.

Some people might be angry with what I’ve said here, yes. I understand that. I don’t like looking at my flaws, I certainly don’t like them pointed out to me. I don’t think anyone does, but you don’t strengthen the foundation of your home by ignoring the cracks. You see them, you point them out, you see how deep they are and then you fix them. We have been great, yes, but only for some, now let’s be great for all.

But this blog is supposed to be about writing right? It is. All of it is. Writing is thinking. Thinking is freedom. When a person can think for him or herself, then they can act for themselves.  

Naming something is a form of writing, even if you never put a pen to paper. When you assign a word to identify someone, you are naming and you are writing that name in your mind and in the mind of everyone else who uses that name. 

When I was in second grade, I had the nickname, “Chip.” School kids loved it. I hated it. I was teased and taunted, and not being much of a fighter at the time, I decided to handle it a different way. I went to my mom after school one day and told her I wanted to be called “Chad,” instead of Chip. I made my case and to my surprise, it worked. The next day, my mother and I went to the school and told the officials I would go by “Chad” from then on. We were only changing my nickname, my legal name, which didn’t seem to fit me then, would not change.

For twenty plus years, I was Chad, and Chad was an angry, narrow-minded man. I moved to Arizona where I met a woman who was into East Indian meditations, Zen meditation. I was attracted to her so naturally I decided to try it. I had a lot of unresolved issues at that time and I didn’t know what to do with them, or in fact, how to identify them. Meditation changed my life, and I changed my name again, (though not legally). I was editing myself and I didn’t know it.  

I meditated every single day. It was tumultuous time for me mentally. I had a narrow view of the world then and my place in it. Despite the meditation I was still stuck, trapped in a room where the walls closed in. I couldn’t get out of it. So I did every kind of meditation, cathartic, dancing, and sitting in absolute silence. I watched my ego dissolve to some degree then. I was hungry to learn more so I submitted my name and my photo to an ashram in Poona, India and received the name, Kranti Chaitanyo. The name was meant to be a message for me, its meaning; “Revolution of Consciousness.”

Asking people to call you by a different name several times in your life is, of course, a bit drastic and a little ridiculous. But for me, at that time in my life, I felt it was necessary. As strange as it sounds, I never felt like me. So I took the message of that strange name to heart and changed from Chad, to Chai. The meditations helped me become more aware, and helped me to identify my anger and how I was projecting it onto others. I learned to take ownership of my pain and to learn from it. None of this was easy.

I went by Chai for about ten years. Then I went to college, where I rediscovered my love of writing and took all the courses on it that I could. When I graduated and began working in the professional world, I was ready to accept the name I’d avoided my whole life, the name I was born with, Albert. As I rewrote my name, I rewrote my life. A constant work in progress, but one for which I could be proud.

What does my changing my name have to do with America or writing? Everything. Each and every one of us here lives a journey uniquely American. Regardless of how we got here, whether we were born here or brought by our parents or moved here seeking a better life. Our lives are written in the story of this country, now and forever.

For so many years, I was not free in my own head. despite all that meditation, despite all the ways in which I’d learned to examine my thoughts, my feelings and my impulses I was still so often a little kid stuck in a room. Writing made me free. It makes me free.

Writing is the sword to slay monsters. It can break the chains of the mind.

Our ideals must be continuously earned. Freedom, like consciousness is an ongoing exercise in staying awake. I had to become independent from my past self, and even from my projected future self. We are in constant rebirth from the moment we come crying from our mother’s wombs. We write and rewrite our lives every day.

We are all America, and each of us has to fight for the freedom to be ourselves. Sometimes the best freedom is escaping your own mind, or getting away from bad habits, the thousand tiny strings that tie us to where we were and keep us from being where we want to be. Freedom is not letting something or someone else define you. Only we can determine who we are. Freedom isn’t a song, or a salute, it’s the heart of every living thing. Freedom is being alive.

We are all America. This is our time to acknowledge our failures, our shortcomings, look our fear in the face, and move forward. Freedom isn’t afraid. Freedom is about being knocked down and getting back up again. It doesn’t matter how many times we fall, or how many times we fail, we have to get back up. Just get the fuck back up.

We are all America. Freedom is always do or die. It’s when the odds are against you, when all signs point to failure, that’s when you get back up. Independence is not about winning and losing, it’s about standing up when you want to sit down. It’s about rising to that moment when you think you can’t do it, that you can’t make it, or that you can’t be the one.

You are the one. We all are.   

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

In the early 1980’s when I was in fourth or fifth grade the teacher showed a film titled, Legend of the Boy & the Eagle (Disney, 1967)*. It’s the story of a young Hopi boy who’s banished from his village and befriends an eagle that teaches him how to hunt. One day he returns to his village but is rejected and mocked by other boys who tie eagle’s feathers to his arms. The Hopi boy flees to a high cliff. When he jumps, he changes into a golden eagle and flies away. It’s a beautiful story and one that has stuck with me all my life. I remember rooting for him in the movie. I dreamt about that film for years. When I was a child, my big take away was that a boy could transform himself into something else and rise above the world he knew.

Some days writing is like setting out with a wide smile on a world of adventure. Other days it’s like getting in a boxing ring with one arm and facing a guy twice my size. All I can do is hope for the best.

What am I going to write? Why am I going to write? Am I going to tap the keys for another fantasy, poetry, or story about a lost childhood? What difference will it make with all that is going on in our world today? What am I going to say that will matter against all the wars and divisions among us? How can I have an effect on the political, racial, or ideological walls that separate people? They say love is the universal language, well so is hate. There’s a lot of both in the world, and each one tugs at the ears of writers to listen. How does my voice find its way in the world?

Being a writer is like being a cartographer for the human soul and mind. Whether we write fantasy, romance, horror, or non-fiction, we are all marking the way to some collective truth for others to find.

Sometimes I think of all those writers who came before. For them it seems, in any period, the world was as it is today: full of doubt, full of confusion and war, but also full of grace and insurmountable love. What would they write about today? My guess is that it would be not that different from what they wrote before. Writing is the constant sharpening of the mind and the self against the dulling forces of time.

I am just a grain of sand on the vast shore of humankind and I know it. All writers are. Despite the futility, the writer, that grain of sand, stands up and tells a story. He or she knows that everyone else has his and her own story to tell. Yet they tell it anyway, knowing all the while that deep down that maybe no one will listen. It might be that only a few will even hear it. Maybe they will love it or they might hate the story, but all the writer knows, and what is important, is that there’s story to be told. It has to come out.

According to data reported in 2017, 7.53 billion people currently live on earth. That means that there are (more or less) seven and a half billion minds out there thinking thoughts, making observations and dreaming when they go to sleep. For any zombies reading this, that’s a lot of brains. For the sake of the metaphor in the above paragraph, it’s also a lot of grains.

There are more people alive today than ever before. Isn’t this how it has always been? The world is full of people, and the number is always more than it’s ever been before. There are always people making war, making love and writers around to document it all and everything in between. There are good writers, and bad ones and some who never get read. What happens to the written word once it’s been read? Does it dissipate like a trail of smoke or does it plant itself like a seed somewhere in the garden of the reader’s mind?  

All these people and all the various cultures have points of view and traditions that differ from one another, but there are two things that ring true no matter where you go; love and hate. We see this in the headlines every day. People doing great things for others out of love, and people doing terrible things to others out of hate.

Where is the love in your story? If you’re writing, it’s in the words. It’s in every easy flowing paragraph or thought and in all the mind-crushingly painful lines that you labor to get down.

As I’ve said before, I believe you write what story sits down with you to write. I believe in this wholeheartedly. However, that does not change the fact that I sometimes question the stories that sit down with me.

“Really?” I say to the pregnant woman in a suit of armor who wants me to write about her again. “The world has gone crazy. You want me to write about you?”

“I’m a pregnant woman in a suit of armor,” she says coolly. “What else are you going to do with me?”

Sigh. “Point taken.”

So, I write fantasy, and generally whatever else comes to mind. What else is there to do? I just have to keep going, keep tapping away at the keys because that’s what I love. Even when it’s hard to get out of bed to write or to work or to do anything, and regardless of whether or not my work is rejected or rejoiced–I have to keep going. This is no different from any other writer who ever kept trying.

It’s love that makes me write. Love of words, love of stories, and humanity itself (and probably a love of my own voice too). Sometimes love inspires me to write about certain things or certain people. Even when I write something full of anger or sadness love is at the source of it. Love may very well be what makes this blue marble spin on the black tile of space.

Or maybe writing is just a way of showing love for oneself. It’s not the kind of love that comes with putting oneself above others, but loving something forgotten, or rather someone. Maybe I write for the little boy I once was, that kid buried under so many layers and years of self-doubt and loathing. In some deep cave, I found him hiding in his mother’s closet, afraid of the basement and giants. With a pen, I can give the boy something to hold onto and crawl out of the dark. With writing, he can become an eagle and fly above his fears.

*If you want to see the video, click on this link to see the ending of the film, Legend of the Boy and the Eagle (Disney, 1967)

When you write about a place you give it life. Perhaps the best way to ground a story is to focus on where it takes place. Steinbeck spent pages describing the California countryside in The Grapes of Wrath, Neil Gaiman sets the story of The Graveyard Book in (you guessed it) a graveyard. I can think of no better example where the setting of a story becomes a character. The setting in that book is alive despite itself. It offers beauty and dread and in this writer’s humble opinion, the story would be lost without it. One could spend days discussing the various uses of setting in literature regardless of genre.

I have always felt that the surroundings the characters of a book find themselves in are tantamount to adding another character to the scene. In Carolyn Forche’s prose poem, The Colonel, the setting stands out as a stark reminder of the situation in which the speaker in the poem finds herself. Stucco walls with broken bottles embedded in them to “scoop the kneecaps” of would be intruders, and the razor wire on the walls, all serve to provide the reader with the sense that the speaker is in a dangerous place. But it’s more than that, it’s as if the dictator’s compound itself looms as a shadowy henchman over the speaker. It makes the implied threat to her real at all times.  

Wherever we go, if we take a look around and notice the uniqueness of our surroundings we might see that even the buildings or mountains or trees appear to have their own sense of personality. I live in Tempe, Arizona. On McDowell and Priest Roads there is a park known as Papago Park. Red Rock Mountains rise from the park at the peak of the hill crested by McDowell to overlook Phoenix. Aside from the amazing sunsets, if you look from the western side of the mountains you can see a face in the rock. It looks like it could be the face of a gorilla or maybe Jabba the Hut melting. I’ve never been able to drive by without noticing it.

What does the use of setting say about the following short pieces based in downtown Phoenix? 

Barrett drives home from the mental health clinic through the familiar streets of Phoenix. The clinic sits behind a dusty, barren lot surrounded by a chain-link fence between railroad tracks and an old factory. Shanty huts made of anything scrounged from dumpsters are stuffed into underpasses like broken childhood dreams. A woman walks down the dimly lit sidewalk as the sun closes its eyes to the world. She stops at a motel with more boards in the windows than glass, wearing a gray gown fit to her form. Down the side, from armpit to ankle, her dress is cut like a knight’s tabard. It gives a side view of the woman’s naked body underneath. Seeing her reminds Barrett of another woman who used to go to his clinic.

The first time he met Grace, Barrett and her case manager conducted a home visit. Grace was a woman in her thirties with a face of sixty. The smell of cigarettes leaned on the nostrils when she opened the door. A cockroach sat in the open on a wall. Grace reported that she took her medications, for the most part. She was wearing a gray dress with a hole cut in the crotch, where the mid-morning light died in her pubic hair. Inside the apartment, a thin mattress sagged on the floor under a weight Barrett could not imagine. There was one chair but no table for the social security checks that paid for the apartment.

“Have you been saved?” Grace asked Barrett.

Surprised, he answered, “I’m not religious, Ma’am.”

She smiled and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

The examples above, I believe, show the use of setting as a means to express a sense of loneliness or hopelessness in someone’s situation. The trappings of poverty or wealth can convey so much about a person in a story. Who they are or what they do can sometimes be decided by their surroundings.   

Below is a different example.

Barrett locked up the clinic for the night and parked his car a few blocks from work. It was Friday, the end to a long and trying week. He was ready for a beer he was ready for twelve. He walked by the old psychiatric center where he used to take people when they were psychotic or suicidal. It had been closed for years and now had a fence around it promising a smart new restaurant or nightclub. The area around it had been gentrified. Where before Barrett would have seen a dive bar, a drive-thru liquor store and a strip club he now saw a coffee house and a trendy spot where people could drink craft beer and play shuffleboard. Downtown was confusing now, there were tall buildings where before was only sky. Smiling women walked together down sidewalks dotted with lamps. The night was young and full of fun. The light of possibility and youth danced on their cheeks.

The setting above shows something quite different from the two before it. Ironically, all these are composites of real parts of Phoenix that are all only a few blocks apart.

Setting is important, and something that I try to give due respect to, though I have been guilty of overwriting it. The characters should still be the focus in the story. I say that for myself as well as anyone who might benefit from it. Too much exposition and not enough character development can stifle a story. As writers, we all have to find our own balance.

Have you ever walked downtown at night and really noticed the various buildings? High rises and squat, rectangular shops are like people in a crowd. How do they fit in a scene? Maybe they are innocent bystanders to the characters in a story. Or maybe they are witnesses who stay silent at the scene of some tragedy. They stand around, apart from one another, nobody speaks–they just stand there knowing. Buildings in cities do not look each other in the eyes. When something happens, they just stand there. Silence is their dialogue, perhaps saying, “This is how it is. This is how it has always been.”

I love writing dialogue. It is where the people in a story really come to life. I mentioned in my last blog, “The Journey,” how writing dialogue and action can ultimately change the course of a scene, a chapter or even the whole story.

How many times have you had a conversation with someone that was so deep it stays with you long after? Even if the conversation was short, I remember instances when I met someone and what we talked about, the gist of it has never left me. Though we may not remember all the words, they create a form that remains in time where that conversation took place. The words then are like a ghost that lingers where a moment was shared with another human being.

We’ve all had trivial or even seemingly meaningless conversations throughout our lives. The “How are yous?” and the “Good mornings,” and all the little bits of dialogue with strangers, or people we see every day. These moments of shared words have meaning too. These tidbits of conversation are like the spaces of blank page between scenes. Everyday words with others give us the space for the important, soul moving talks to grow. We need it all to complete the stories we live, and the ones we write.  

What an incredible creature the tongue is. It tastes our food, keeps our lips from being dry, it can signify disapproval with a simple protrusion from its little cave. It can be used for pleasure when invited to play with another person to whom we are attracted. Mainly though, we use it to fit sounds around our thoughts and push them out of our mouths to be understood, feared, adored or obeyed. It’s like having a miniature god to control, one who obeys our commands only some of the time. Without it we would have no spoken word, but with it, the ability to say anything. Words are used to create, convey, or destroy. It’s how we use them that matters. Where would humanity be now if we’d never developed the ability to use these sounds that that somehow make sense? What would the world be without them?

I’ve heard it said that you need other people in order to be human. I think that might be true. Talking can reveal a new sense of being. Words spoken aloud when alone are like puffs of smoke. They may linger for a while, they might even be good to hear for ourselves, but they dissipate quickly without others to hear them. Words spoken aloud with another person are like tiny strings that tie us to one another, even if they are meant to drive us apart. Words matter and they have form.

When you’re writing, how many times have you had two characters speak in a scene when one of them says something you didn’t expect? Aren’t we as the authors supposed to have total command of the words our characters speak? I think yes and no. there is something to be said for just letting the conversation play out. I like to put two characters in a scene and let them go. Much of what I write in such moments is ultimately cut, but in my opinion, it’s the best way to get the most authentic conversation out of the people.

We create our characters from some primordial pool of our imagination. On paper, we set them upright, and give them a face, and a name, and motives by using little black letters set in a row. Yet, I believe that aside from the actions they take, it is in the moments when we let them talk that we learn the most about them.  

Conversation between two or more people is a living thing. Sometimes when I write dialogue I just play it out, I try to go where the characters’ conversation goes and they reveal themselves even more. I have had moments of dialogue reshape entire chapters. It can be illuminating and frustrating, just like talking to a person. Dialogue is alive. It becomes its own character, and that character has a place in the story. 

“A story should entertain the writer too.” – Stephen King

I am only talking about my process here. Maybe something will be amusing or helpful to another writer, if so, I will feel fulfilled, and if not, I thank you for reading.

To my good friends I am not known for my spontaneity. The phrase, “a man of routine,” has been uttered about me a time or two. I like to cook a giant crock-pot full of food so that I don’t have to wonder what I will eat for lunch during the week when I’m at work. Sometimes I do cook the same thing several times before changing it up, but that’s only because I love my own cooking. I generally get up at the same time every day, around 5:30am, I eat the same breakfast, and I drink the same coffee.

It’s not that I’m opposed to change, but the goal for me is productivity. Time is valuable, and I try to use it to the best of my ability and write as much as I can before I have to leave for work. I eat the same thing because it takes no deciding, and that leaves me more time to devote my thinking to whatever it is I’m working on at the time. Writing is an adventure. It’s like going on safari in my mind. Having certain mundane things taken care of is like packing enough water and a first aid kit when you go on a hike. I like to have all the nuts & bolts taken care of so I can enjoy the journey, after all, safety first!

The Stephen King quote above puts into words something I have always felt. It is so important to be surprised, moved, saddened or even elated when you write. I have felt them all as sit at my computer and tip-tap out the fate of people only I know. That happens because when I write, I think of it as an experience the characters and I are having together. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I am literally unaware of what’s going to happen to the people in my stories, but there have been many times over the course of my novel, Mother Made of Iron where I was legitimately surprised.

When I write I try to maintain a level of curiosity and wonder. I do plan certain things, but I would not call myself a planner when I write. Nor could I ever get away with saying that for anything else in my life. I don’t know where things are going to go all the time. I may have a general idea and a structure of sorts but it often works out differently than originally planned. This may explain why it took ten years and two attempts to get the book right.

(I did mention this is not meant to be advice right?)

Music for me can be a great medium for spontaneity. I will often listen to music when I write, as I am sure others do. No words, just music, words get in the way. Typically, I listen to soundtracks of movies or whatever music I come upon that moves me to write. I once wrote eighty-seven pages from listening to the 55-second intro to Metallica’s, Unforgiven 3. It’s a haunting piano piece that I challenge anyone not to be inspired by.

I love how dynamic writing can be. Whether you stare at a sunset, a mountain, or the face of a beautiful woman, words come marching in. I never know what is going to happen when I sit down to write. Sometimes I have an idea, I know where I want to go but not how I’ll get there. The map is never finished until it’s finished. The journey is the joy.

When I was writing my novel, I had watched the movie, Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson. The music in that movie is amazing. I found clips of it on YouTube and listened to one particular clip, “Melting Into Matter,” by Eric Serra, which is all of 3:31 seconds and wrote an entire chapter of my book listening to it again and again. It was so moving, and the imagery that came to me when I listened to this beautiful piece of music added a kind of beauty to the character’s story line. I get this from music all the time.

Certain types of music belong to specific characters I have found. The music I previously mentioned was for only one person in my novel, “Faunie.” She was originally meant to be only a minor person in the story. What she became, and what she is still becoming grew beyond my imagination.

Through the combination of dialogue, action and a healthy dose of music Faunie turned into one of the most significant characters I’ve ever written. When I started writing out her scenes, I had no idea what would happen, but she has since become so real I miss not writing her right now. She owns a special place in my heart, this girl with a black wing mark on her arm. I hope to introduce her to people one day.

“A writer is working when looking out the window.” – Unknown

What is wrong with taking time away from writing? Nothing, it is not a bad thing. It can even be, at times, necessary. You can’t do one thing too much without reaching a point of exhaustion. I write every day, generally speaking, but there are times when that’s just not possible. Life has to be lived. We have to work, we have to relate to others, take care of those who are important to us in whatever ways we do. Mothers have to be mothers, fathers have to be fathers, and friends have to be friends.

Time away from writing is not the same as not writing however. Each and every single one of life’s experiences and moments we live, whether they are shared with others or by ourselves are subject to later material. Our minds are like refineries taking in our senses and memories and turning them into potential fuel for stories. The refinery never shuts down, never stops.  

I once got into oil painting, deeply into oil painting. I mean that both literally and financially, (it’s not cheap to paint with oil). I got so into it that I didn’t write for probably a year. I had no idea what I was doing, had never taken a class save for the typical art classes you take in high school. I enjoyed it, like writing it got intense–I would sometimes spend up to eight hours painting and could get so lost in it that I wouldn’t eat until I felt I was going to pass out (something I had only ever done with writing).

Being creative feeds me. I eat at work almost non-stop. I might as well have a feedbag strapped around my neck so I can graze endlessly throughout the day. On average, I have three meals at work from 8 to 5 and snack on whatever I can find. When I am at home, writing, I hardly stop at all to eat. As I typed that last sentence, it is 9:32 pm and I’ve eaten twice since I got up at 5:00am.

I am no visual artist, but I had fun doing it while I did. I think in some way it made me a better writer. Exercising my creativity with different skills only makes it stronger. When I first started painting, I did so out of grief. I was going through the breakup of my life at the time and after spending years of writing, I felt that words would not do the trick. I picked up a brush and filled my small apartment then with drawings, easels and canvases and the ubiquitous smell of oil paint and turpentine based cleaner. I took a few classes at my local park recreation center and learned a few things. One day in 2008, I just stopped and put down the brush to sit at the keyboard again. I haven’t painted since.

I still dabble in drawing sometimes, but the painting days are over, at least for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t long after I’d stopped trying to channel my inner Van Gogh that I came upon my idea for my fantasy novel. Once that hit, I was in full-blown creative mode for ten years straight, writing like a man possessed, because I was. Taking a break from writing may or may not work for other writers. Only the writer can determine that for her or himself.

We don’t know what will happen in life, so there is always a risk, but in my case at least, I feel it was necessary. Taking a step back is scary though, I must admit. However, I had exhausted myself and I needed to refuel in a way that fed me differently. The creative side of my soul is a ravenous creature. It stopped eating for a while there, and had I not fed it with visual art it might have gone mad and eaten me alive. If I don’t put words down, or if I am unable to get the time to write for more than a day or so an irritable restlessness boils up inside.

Like some kind of fiend, I have to sate it or it will consume me. Writing a line here or a paragraph there whenever I can keeps me sane.

One of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me was a Moleskine notebook. I have carried one around with me ever since. It fits in my back pocket and has saved me from forgetting an idea so many times I could not begin to count them. So often, it has helped me, in many ways. Before I start a new Moleskine, I “bless” it with a number of quotes from other authors on the topic of writing itself. The current one I carry around starts with the quote below, which I believe says everything I’ve said in this blog, only she says it better.  

            “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” –Virginia Woolf