Writing

It’s Really Real.

Posted on by James C. Struck

books

A 14 hour shift, from 3:30 AM to 5:30 PM, on two hours of sleep.  Not an ideal situation by any means, and made far worse by the reason for it: Black Friday.  To say I was exhausted when I got home would the greatest of understatements.  Closer would be that I felt like I’d been beaten with sticks and dragged backwards by one ankle through a running bumper car carnival ride.  Couple that with the strange, overwound feeling you get when you drink 6 cups of coffee and not eat enough and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how I felt on Friday when I got home.

And then I got this box.

I got the original idea for The Curious Snowflake sometime around the autumn of 2005, give or take.  I finally put it down on paper in April of 2009, published it on Kindle in September of 2010, and finally got behind self-promotion of it in late summer of 2013.  I first heard of my publisher Booktrope last autumn from my dear friend and fellow author Dennis Sharpe, sent my query email to them in February, got accepted in April, and spent the entire summer in team building, edits, and adjustments. Ten-and-a-half years this idea has been with me.  In that time my two youngest children were born, we moved 100 miles from where my wife and I grew up, I went from a part-time librarian to a full-time retail manager, I cut off my ponytail, gained 15 pounds, lost 30, then gained 15 back again, bought a house, went gray and got bifocals.  Yet this idea has remained, and my belief in it has never wavered.  My philosophy has evolved, deepened, matured, and the edits show that, but the core of TCS is unchanged: curiosity is beautiful, no one really understands life completely, the insistence on being Right is the most damaging idea humans have ever devised, there is no judgment in the Divine, All is One merely appearing separate.  The durability of TCS’s basic ideas is my greatest philosophical joy, and my greatest source of gratitude.

And here it is, at long last. I can hold it in my hands.

I opened the box in the kitchen, surrounded by over-bright florescents and that horrible 70’s yellow wallpaper we haven’t gotten rid of just yet, and just smiled.  Then I called my wife in and handed her the first copy out of the box.  She grinned and threw her arms around my neck, whispering in my ear how proud she was of me.  I handed a copy to each of my kids, then took the other 21 into the bedroom, carefully unpacked them, and spread them out on the bed.  Then I just sat there and stared at them, too exhausted to do the silly happy dance I otherwise would do, trying to wrap my head around the truth: I am a published author.

I don’t know what will happen now.  TCS could continue to flounder in obscurity, despite everything Booktrope and my book manager and I will do.  It could sell a few hundred copies, touch a few people, and then be forgotten.  It could take off, allow me to be a full-time author, share my ideas for a living.  I have no idea.  None of that really matters right now, though.  What matters is those words, on a page in a real book, those words I wrote over a decade or so, on a yellow legal pad, while sitting on my bed.

“Once upon a time there was a Snowflake.”

🙂

My Distractions, Addictions, and Priorities

Posted on by James C. Struck

Hi, my name is Jim and I am a video game junkie. (Hi Jim)

A little about me.  By night, I am James C. Struck, published spirituality author, aspiring novelist, loving husband and father of three, and blogger on all things that come into my fool head.  But by day I am King Geek of the Illinois River Valley, the ponytailed purveyor of mindless pixelated violence, endless side-quests, and all things that keep nerds pale, pasty, and indoors.

Translation: I’m a Store Manager for GameStop.

addicted-to-video-games

One of the lovely fringe benefits of retail management in the video game industry is I get a LOT of free stuff.  I mean obscene amounts.  Enough where my employees regularly threaten to beat me senseless for it.  While this is certainly nice from a monetary point of view, it does create one problem; I am, in the immortal words of Scarface, getting high on my own supply.  It’s one thing when you have to pick and choose which games to buy, because that allows you to prioritize, but when you (not joking here) get every single major video game release for free, you not only end up playing the games you were looking forward to, but also quite a few you otherwise would never have touched.

Now, were I like the average GS manager (young and single) this would not be as much of an issue, but I am, as I mentioned above, a family man.  Between work, kids, wife, and a house that always seems to need something done to it, I need an addiction to video games like I need a hole in the head.  But of course, it’s not just that. I am, finally after trying for nearly 7 years, a published author, and in this day and age being an author comes with certain expectations.  Simply writing isn’t enough, now authors need to have a blog, and a FB page, and a Twitter account, and a Goodreads page, and keep them all up on a regular basis, interconnecting them to create a “platform” through which potential fans can reach and interact with me.  And the writing thing, don’t forget that.  Kinda need to write if I want to be an author.

And yet here I am, logging onto Destiny on my PS4 at 11:45pm so I can check if I have enough Strange Coins yet to buy that exotic sniper rifle from Xur.  No wonder I’ve only written 11 pages in my WIP since late August.

Action-expresses-priorities

All joking aside, everyone needs their mindless entertainments.  Everyone needs to decompress.  Writing, while I love it, requires a certain amount of gas in the tank to get going, and the only way to fill up that tank is to unplug every once in a while.  But we live in a world where the line between entertainments and addictions is very, very blurry (perhaps deliberately so, but that’s another blog post), and crossing the line is a little too easy.  I try to claim that my creative output falls off the table in autumn because of the workload at my job spiking and because I suffer from mild SAD, but I know that’s only most of it.  There is that siren’s call of all those lovely new games, those new stories and experiences and achievements tugging at me, pulling me away from my priorities.  And sometimes they succeed.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this.  So if you’d like, tell me about your distractions, your addictions.  What in your life pulls you away from your priorities a little more than is good for you?  We all have them.  Share.  Knowing that others know the struggle will help all of us.  I’d love to hear about yours.

Peace, Light, Love, everyone.

A Sense of Accomplishment

Posted on by James C. Struck

I start way more things than I finish.

I think that’s pretty common for writers.  We get the idea, the great and glowing thing in our heads, and we dash off to our computer (or in my case, my notebook) and get to work, scribbling or tapping away.  Sometimes the idea just dries up and we stop.  Sometimes we keep going for a while and then we get another idea and drop the first one.  Sometimes we keep at it but our doubts and insecurities and lives and busyness and procrastination and what have you just get in the way.

But sometimes, just sometimes, none of this happens.

I’ve just today finished the longest thing I’ve ever written.  It took me 13 months (yeah, no NaNoWriMo for Jimmy) to write 157 pages of longhand YA modern fantasy novel.  It’s the first time I’ve ever finished anything close to this length that was fiction; most of my longer stuff is philosophical ramblings.  The previous story record was about 50 pages and that was in 2003.  And the best part is that I’m not done.  The story, assuming I finish it, is a trilogy.

So why am I bothering to document this in Cyberspace, and why do I think anyone else will give a crap about it?

We live in a society where accomplishment is measured in material things.  Success is weighed in square footage of house, names on clothing tags, shininess of car.  We rarely allow ourselves, or perhaps we are rarely allowed, to feel accomplishment for its own sake, to just feel good about “hey, I did that”.  It has to be “okay, you did that, now what will you do with it?”  Everything has to be a product.

Yet real accomplishment has nothing to do with that.  Our sense of worth and worthiness is garnered from being something, not having something.  Think of the times you really felt good about yourself.  Did it have anything to do with some material acquisition, or did it come from within?  Neale Donald Walsch once wrote that part of the reason our society is so unhappy is because we have what he calls the “be/do/have paradigm” upside down.  We think that, in order to be something, happy for instance, we have to have something first, like more money.  This having will allow us to do things (take a trip, buy a house, pay a bill) which will then allow us to be what we want (happy).  He says that we have this backwards.  We instead should decide what we want to be, then do things that move us towards that.  This will then create things to have that work with the doing and being.

Today I have finished my book.  I did this because I chose to be a writer and to stick to it, no matter what.  This led me to do something, which was to make time to write every day, even if it was just a few minutes to write a few words.  This made it possible for me to have a finished book, and a great sense of accomplishment because of it.

Mr. Walsch might be onto something. 🙂

What It’s Like To Be A Writer

Posted on by James C. Struck

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Being a writer is unlike any other creative profession, and I know this because I’ve tried quite a few. I’ve been a performing musician since I was a kid, and trust me, writing is completely different than music or theatre or just about anything else I’ve ever tried. Why? Because writers are completely nuts. Let me give you a few examples.

We have people living in our heads, and they can be little assholes.

Writing can be a very inconvenient creative outlet, mostly because the characters that we dream up (or perhaps find, but that’s a different blog post) really are little people in our heads. And just like real people, fictional people can be demanding. They want attention, have cranky days, act impulsively and thoughtlessly, and sometimes want to be heard at times that are inconvenient to say the least. Like while you’re driving 70 mph down the interstate. Or at 2:30 AM.

Worse yet, they have times when they don’t want to talk to us. Maybe they’re sulking, maybe they’re tired, maybe they’re just feeling stubborn, but no matter the reason sometimes our fictional friends just clam up. Of course, we writers aren’t really allowed to deal with this the way we really should. If a friend or a loved one decides they don’t want to talk to you, it’s perfectly acceptable to get upset or hurt, but if a fictional character does? Suck it up. Doesn’t matter how much you miss them, doesn’t matter how much it hurts, because as far as the rest of the world is concerned, fictional people aren’t real.

We writers know better. Yes, I know how crazy that sounds.

We have strange obsessions with things having to do with writing and the written word.

I am an old school writer, pen and paper. Mostly this is because it keeps me from editing the idea to death, but the downside of this I am obsessed with notebooks and pens. In any room of my house there are at least 3-4 notebooks hidden somewhere: shoved onto bookshelves, mixed in with my sheet music, on the end table, under the couch, on the dresser. And yes, this does not endear me to my loving wife.

Of course, she also bought me a leather bound journal for Father’s Day. Thank you, my Love. 🙂

Then there’s my pens. Unlike notebooks, where I am a gourmand, with pens I am a gourmet. I buy and use one kind of pen and one kind only: Pentel RSVP Black Fine Tip. I believe I have at least 42 of them scattered around my house and my work, as well as at least one package of multicolored RSVPs for edits.

And yet every time I go to Target or Walmart or (oh god help me) Staples, I am drawn to the stationary aisle as though there’s a black hole there that only affects me. They’re a drug, I’m addicted.

And don’t get me started on our book collections

One day, the foundation of my house is going to throw up its figurative arms, say “gg”, and collapse under the sheer weight of the books inside it. This is SO much worse than the notebook thing, partly because I’ve been reading since I was 4 but writing only since I was 15, but mostly because my whole family are addicts of the written word. There isn’t a horizontal surface in my house that does not house at least one book. The closing of a local book store was a cause for tears, no joke. No book aisle can be simply walked past by my family.

Every author I know is like this. Our bookshelves are packed two rows deep and then more books are stacked in front of them, usually divided into “read”, “unread”, and “get to it one day”. And god help us if we discover a new author we love, especially a prolific one. Or a series that is out of print, that’s even worse.

Discount bins? $1 racks at local resale shops? Library book sales? They’re like rolling a wheelbarrow of crack out in front of a junkie. I could not tell you how many books I’ve purchased because “it’s only $1, it’s only $.50”. Shit I will never read. I bought a copy on the Quran in Arabic and a Latin Vulgate Bible. Why? They were pretty and I wanted to see if they would spontaneously combust if I put them next to each other on the shelf. It’s pathetic.

Mood = Creative Output

There is nothing, nothing more sad and pathetic than a stuck writer. I know, I’ve been there. It’s like being emotionally constipated. We are surly, moody, sulky, and generally unpleasant to be around.

If anything, being on a roll is worse.

Not for the writer, mind you. For us, being on a roll is like being in love: Cloud Nine. But just like being in love, the only person who can stand being around us is the object of our affection. To everyone else, we are vague, selfish, absorbed, and obsessed. I knocked out my first draft of The Curious Snowflake in less than two weeks, and my wife told me later I was impossible to live with, utterly somewhere else. The only time writers are worth being around are on good editing days, and even that’s a stretch.

Everybody else is character fodder.

My MMC in my WIP (male main character in my work-in-progress, get with the nomenclature) is part me, part my son, and is based physically on one of my employees. His mentor is a short version of an old college buddy. The villain is my old voice coach (actually a great guy).

This is how it works. Authors want to make characters who are actually people, so they end up being a pastiche of the people we actually know. Famous, best selling authors do this all the time. Don’t believe me? Read the section at the beginning of Stephen King’s On Writing where he talks about meeting his wife and then go back and read, say, ‘Salem’s Lot or The Stand. Yeah, there’s a little Tabby King in almost every FMC ol’ Steve’s ever written.

So don’t piss off your writer friends, or you might find yourself immortalized in their prose.

So yeah, we’re basically nucking futz

Obsessive. Selfish. Oblivious. Moody. Judgmental. Perhaps even a little schizo-affective. So why does the rest of the world put up with us writers? Because we are also are loving, inspiring, thoughtful, and (at the best times) a little bit amazing. Most important, we write these stories and ideas that touch other people in positive and even wonderful ways. For that, I think, the rest of the “normal” people should cut us nutty authors a little slack.