Everything seems to be displaying correctly now. Turned out the problem was a combination of some of the images being slightly too large, and the ads being slightly too large.
Sometimes my life feels like one continuous IT troubleshooting session. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get the computers in the house to talk to various printers on the network–especially the printer on our SMC router/print server. Ay caramba. Plus my PDA went dead last night and had to have everything reloaded. Plus the laptop that lost its video display and is now a desktop plugged into a monitor. So much for portability.
Oh well, I guess we’re better off with these things than without them. Just wish they didn’t rule our lives quite so much.
Now I must get back to work on my new project. More on that in a forthcoming post.
I don’t know why, but something’s gone wrong with the way this blog displays in Internet Explorer (the righthand bar is pushed way to the bottom). It looks fine in Firefox, which is what I usually browse with. Until I can figure out the problem and correct it, I’ll just have to ask you IE users to excuse our appearance. Thanks.
I’m glad you asked. The answer is, more than you might think. I wrestled all four years when I was in high school in Huron, Ohio, and during my first year of undergraduate school, at Brown University. During that time, I learned that wrestling requires enormous dedication, self-discipline, and conditioning. Also, that stepping out onto the mat as a young adult, to face an opponent one-on-one, calls on all your reserves of courage and poise. And that in the long run, the experience goes a long way toward developing self-confidence. (I was a pretty shy kid, really—kind of geeky, afraid of girls, and not terribly good at sports in general. This sport represented a major area of growth for me.) Coached properly, wrestling also develops a sense of good sportsmanship, respect for the opponent, and the ability to win and lose with equal grace.
Writing, for anyone who hopes to do it professionally, requires if anything even greater dedication and self-discipline. My wrestling experience probably did more to prepare me for the long, tough haul of making it as a writer than any other single thing I did as a student, including taking writing courses. As an aspiring writer, I put in endless hours of work with zero promise of reward, only hope and determination. Like just about all new writers, I met setback after setback, and had to choose between quitting or plugging ahead. (This process is ongoing, by the way. It doesn’t just happen to aspiring writers. There are lots of professional writers out there, including me, who are engaged in an ongoing struggle to keep their careers alive and healthy.)
Courage and poise? Well, for a lot of people, putting a manuscript in an envelope and sending it off, unsolicited, to a publisher takes about as much courage as stepping out onto a mat. And you have to learn to lose with grace if you’re going to make it in the writing business. The poise and the self-confidence come with time. And come in mighty handy the first time you step up to a podium to speak to an audience as a “guest author.”
(Momentary digression: if you’re unfamiliar with the sport of wrestling and think I’m talking about anything even remotely related to the stuff they show on TV under the name “professional wrestling,” no. Don’t. No resemblance. Don’t even talk to me about it.)
A surprising number of wrestlers turn out to be good students, as well. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising; the same self-discipline comes into play. Some pretty well-known writers were also wrestlers. And also some less-well-known writers.*
*It pains me to acknowledge it, but a well-known thug who is also our current Secretary of Defense was also a wrestler and coach. Oh well, no sport’s perfect.
Got home late last night from a weekend in New Jersey, attending our first all-girls wrestling tournament, the USGWA New Jersey Girls Wrestling State Championships Open. Lexi placed second in her weight grouping, winning three matches (one with a pin and one in double overtime) and losing one. More importantly, she had a great time, and made some new wrestling friends from other states. One of the organizers commented on his past experience with girls’ tournaments, noting that the girls are much more likely than the boys to get together after competing and hug and make friends with each other.
Most of the girls we talked to were in the same position as Lexi–participating on boys’ wrestling teams, often as the only girl, and attending events like this after the season. A recent USA Today article on girls’ wrestling noted that the number of high school girls wrestling nationwide is currently about 4000, up from about 100 in 1990.
You just never know what the mail (or email) is going to bring. As a result of my posting Lexi’s wrestling photos earlier on this blog, I recently heard from an old college teammate of mine. He sent along a photo of the Brown University freshman wrestlers from…well, a number of years ago. I studied the photo, and studied it, and finally recognized one of the guys. (Is that me?)
Yeah, I guess it is. (Neither of my daughters were able to pick me out of the picture, nor could my brother. My wife did, though.)
Here it is, from days long ago, at a university not so far away.
Ah. Yes. People have been emailing me for years, asking when the devil the fourth Chaos book is going to be out. Not to mention, my editor and publisher, who have been patiently checking in from time to time, hardly ever mentioning the fact that my deadline is so far in the past it’s nearly red-shifted out of sight. (Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Tom.) Guilt, guilt.
Well, it’s not because I meant to take so long, or haven’t been trying. The first thing that happened was that I had another book to do under a prior contract, which was going to take me a year or two to write—and then I’d get right back to the Chaos series. As it happened, that book was way harder to write than I ever imagined, and longer, and it took nearly five years to get finished. (That was Eternity’s End, and I’m happy to say that it’s met with a good response, and earned me my first and only Nebula Award nomination.) By the time I came back to the Chaos universe, the trail felt a little cold. I had to reread the first three books myself. (I’m rereading them again now, to keep the story clear in my head. You forget things, after a while.)
Basically, three things happened at once, as I worked on Sunborn:
I undertook a book that was way, way harder to write than I thought when I outlined it. (Lots of really cosmic stuff, sentient stars and so on, but at the same time a deeply personal story, always told on a human scale.)
My life as a parent was becoming increasingly full, with lots of activities and competing needs filling the days; and, as well, a need to do consulting work as a writer/editor to help pay the bills. (This is a good place to acknowledge the debt that I, and you my readers, too, owe my wife for bringing in a steady income through her work. Thanks, kiddo. I appreciate it.)
Doing all this other work made it really hard to keep the novel centered in my mind, so that even when I had time to work on it, I couldn’t concentrate.
I’ve been wandering in something of a creative desert for the last few years, trying to find the inspiration to turn this into the book I envisioned (and promised you, my readers) years ago.
Like many of my writer friends, I was trying hard not to feel depressed about the state of my career, the state of the marketplace, the shrinking sales of our books compared to the way they sold 15 or 20 years ago, the loss of readers to competing forms of entertainment (movies, TV, mega-bestsellers, the internet, blogs [oops]). One always tries to appear upbeat in public, but it wasn’t always convincing on the inside.
I began to lose my ability to count.
Somehow, though, I kept at it. The constant support and cajoling of my writing group was invaluable—as was other forms of support, from people who cared enough about my ability to keep writing to help in significant ways. And always at the back of it all, the feeling that God had given me a certain gift for writing, and I wanted to make good on that gift. (Plus, all those promises I’d made to you my readers over the years.)
And so, here I am at an important milestone in this project. As I said in the last post, I have a lot still to do. Probably two more complete drafts, anyway. But it should go faster now, and with much greater feeling of hope.
Yes. At last. I have typed the ending words of the fourth book of The Chaos Chronicles! And they are:
“To be continued…”
Which isn’t a joke, of course, if you’ve been following the Chaos series. My faithful readers have been waiting a lonnnnng time for this fourth book in the series, the fourth of a planned six total. (I was shocked myself to look back at the header in the early chapters: I started this thing in the fall of the year 2000. Oy.)
Note the title of this entry, though. First draft finished. I’ve got a lot of rewriting to do. A lot of rewriting. It all came together and made sense (I think) in the end. But a lot of the 706 manuscript pages of this book are…well, I’ll be polite because this is a family publication…a godawful mess. But that’s okay. Really. Because getting that first draft down is the crucial thing. I can always work with it and straighten out the things that are wrong, once I have it down on paper (or phosphors, or LCD pixels) to look at. It’ll take me a while, and it’ll hurt, but I know I can do it.
Wow. It’s been too long since I’ve posted–about two weeks. I’ve been caught up in work deadlines (editing–which involves some writing, but not my writing). That’s now behind me for a while, so I’m getting back to work on Sunborn, starting today.
Last weekend I attended Boskone, a very good science fiction convention held in Boston every year, and had a chance to catch up with some of my writing friends. I also picked up some of the latest offerings from Full Cast Audio, dramatized readings of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Have Spacesuit Will Travel and The Rolling Stones. If you haven’t heard any of Full Cast Audio’s productions, you really should check them out. They use terrific voice actors, and present books in unabridged form. (The man behind the operation is Bruce Coville, who obviously doesn’t have enough to do writing his immensely popular books for kids.) Visit their web site! (And no, I don’t get a kickback from them. But tell them I sent you, anyway.)
As a way to unwind a bit from the editing before starting work again on the book, I turned to a bit of amateur carpentry today. We’ve been doing some renovations in our kitchen, which included replacing the sink cabinet and counter, and putting in a proper dishwasher. That meant we could pass on our old portable dishwasher to someone else, but it left an empty space where the old one provided a small counter by our stove. So…not wanting to throw out something that could be useful, I decided to cannibalize the old cabinet, and see if I could manage to stack two drawers that used to be at opposite ends of the old counter. So I cut the cabinet remnants (it had been pretty well torn apart) and the old countertop -and it looks as if it’s going to work. (Fingers crossed -it’s not done yet.)
And now, I promised I’d get to work on the book, so I’m getting.
Have you ever wondered just how honest vanity presses are? Well, one of them just showed its stripes to the world. Read about their hilarious comeuppance at www.sfwa.org/news/atlantanights.htm. (Thirty writers got together and submitted the worst manuscript they could come up with, to see if it would be accepted for publication by a “selective” subsidy publisher.)
In case you’re not sure what a vanity press is, it’s a “publisher” that preys upon would-be writers by charging the writers hefty fees to print their books—regardless of quality, or lack of it—with little or no editorial guidance. The unfortunate writer is then left with a thinner wallet and a garage full of generally unsalable books.
I hear from a lot of aspiring writers, asking about careers in writing. One correspondent wrote me recently, expressing a great desire to write and to succeed in publishing, and asking what one might expect to earn as a published writer. Here’s my reply, in part:
I’m glad to hear of your interest in writing, and your willingness to learn. It’s a long, difficult road, but it can offer many rewards.
Few of those rewards are likely to be monetary, though. Yes, some people do well–especially if they are prolific. It helps if you write fast, and well, and have a great many stories to tell. Some writers who do well financially are excellent writers; some are not. I can’t tell you why.
You asked what the least was that I made in a year from writing, so that you’d know what to expect. That’s an easy one. Zero. Nada. Zilch. That’s what you can expect. You can’t be in it for the money. If the money comes, that’s a wonderful bonus. But you can’t bank on it, so to speak. If you do, you are apt to be very, very disappointed. You must be in it because you want to write and have stories to tell, and are willing to work hard to tell them well.
My one piece of advice is to try to put your desire to see your name on the cover of a book way, way to the back of your mind. Everyone feels it, of course, including those who already have their names on the covers of books. But thinking about that will not help you learn to write. And that’s what you have to do–learn to write. There are many, many skills that come together in the craft of writing, including storytelling, grammar, voice, sentence structure, vocabulary, imagination, organization of thought, knowledge of science and society and psychology, life experience, and many other things. Concentrate on all of these things. Expect to spend years practicing, and learning from others. Read books on writing. Join a workshop. Get feedback.
Do these things, and perhaps one year you will fulfill your dream of seeing your name on a book cover and sitting next to a favorite author at a signing. (There’s no guarantee, that’s one of the kickers.) Be fiery and determined, but don’t be too impatient.
Read my further Advice to Aspiring Writers, and consider looking at my writing course on CD, which you’ll see a link to on that page. (It’s out of print, but Amazon had some used copies, last time I looked.)
Yeah, I guess it is. (Neither of my daughters were able to pick me out of the picture, nor could my brother. My wife did, though.)