Don’t take this wrong, because I support all the writers whose work I enjoy reading by buying their books (new), as well as reading their blogs and leaving favorable comments on Amazon, but there’s always a part of me, as a “pre-published” (thanks for the term, Nathan) writer that feels a little neglected by the online community. For instance, the website Fangs, Fur, and Fey doesn’t allow us as-yet-unpublished scribes to join their little club. And many people refer to unpublished writers as “hobbyists,” a term that really jerks my chain.

I don’t consider what I do a hobby. Granted, I don’t make a living off my creative writing yet (business and technical writing and editing has supported me for years), but calling it a hobby is, to me, somehow denigrating what I do. Did the writers who eventually — through years of hard work and slogging through rejections and ridicule — got published ever feel their writing was merely a hobby?

To me, a hobbyist is someone who does something (whether that be writing, painting, gardening, whatever) for their own personal enjoyment. In others (in the case of a writer), not for the specific purpose of publication.

I’ve recently worked to seek out and support others of the unpublished community. I’ve revised many of my links to include their blogs and websites so that any small amount of traffic I may attract will likewise find them and perhaps nurture a budding new fan.

So to any unpublished writers out there who may read this, please contact me and send a link to your site or blog so that we can support each other. And once again, thank you, Nathan, for recognizing that just because we haven’t been published yet, doesn’t mean we aren’t seriously working to that end.

Well, there’s the pothole. I don’t know what comes next. I know what comes after what comes next, and what comes after that, but this particular sequence is crucial to everything that follows, so what comes next has to be something good. Something that creates tension, advances the plot, drops a few clues but doesn’t give away too much …

Gee, no pressure, there. Anyone who says writing isn’t hard work has never done it. I’ve been sweating it out in that church for nearly a week now, waiting for an answer (pretty appropriate place to have it happen, wouldn’t you say?). I sent Cole to that church for a reason and now I have to figure out what it is.

Don’t you just wish sometimes the characters would make those decisions themselves? Get up and show some initiative instead of sitting around waiting for Writer to tell them what to do. Take it upon themselves to open up a portal to the mind of Writer and find all the answers they seek.

Maybe I need to get away from this computer and get some sleep.

When you write for corporate and engineering publications, all they want is the facts. Just A, then B, then C …. etc.

B-o-r-i-n-g. But it paid the bills.

It took awhile to get used to, but eventually I became very good at my job. The problem was, after 20 years in the field, I became so good at taking the embellishment out of my writing, I had trouble putting it back in.

It’s been seven years since I worked in the corporate environment, and at times I still struggle with rediscovering my creative voice. I still fall into the habit of taking the straight line from A to B without dawdling on side trips or details. And while I don’t work full-time at that kind of writing any more, I do occasionally do freelance editing and writing.

Like now. I’ve been rolling along on my latest WIP and yet, because I have this crazy need to pay my bills and put food on the table, I’ve taken a large and involved freelance writing/editing job. Which means for the next several weeks, I’ve got to shift back to the left-side writing to meet my deadline.

I know there are people who adjust to this kind of activity easily. People who can compartmentalize their writing into creative and non-creative. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. And being older doesn’t help. The brain just isn’t as flexible as it was 20 years ago.

So I’ll put the WIP on hold while I earn my keep and hope when I come back to it, it won’t take me a week to slip back into my right-side voice.

1.0 Wednesday

There’s nothing worse than the morning after a trip to hell.

I managed to make it to the bathroom before the fireworks started, kicking off what I knew would be the equivalent of a massive hangover. If I was lucky, it would only last a few hours, but I’d had trips that crippled me for days.

Since I was doing inventory at the bar today, I hoped this was going to be one of my shorter recoveries. I pushed myself up off the cold concrete floor and leaned against the sink, staring at the face in the mirror.

Hell can be hard on your body, even if your body is made for it. Bruised shadows circled my gray eyes and my dark hair hung in tangled ringlets around a face soiled with the dried blood of some anonymous recipient of my unwelcome attention. Trust me, not a face you want to meet in a dark alley.

I slathered a toothbrush with paste and attacked my mouth like the dirty toilet it felt like, then stripped and stepped into a scalding shower, grateful for the pulsing spray head I’d installed last month. While tiny needles of water stripped away the evidence of my latest descent into depravity, I forced my mind to retreat to blissful ignorance.

I don’t dwell on the horrible things I do. I learned long ago you can’t change what you are, and worrying about it only compounds the agony. Some people paint, some sell cars.

I kill.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Right now I’m beating the crap out of my MC, Cole. The poor guy’s face has just been used as a punching bag for a nest of demented sorcerers, the one person he thought was his friend has betrayed him, there’s a passel of strangers in town trying to kill him, and, oh yeah, he has a psychopathic killer demon living in his brain. And yet, I know I can’t give him a break. Not yet.

I’m taking him to a church today to pray that something starts going right. Then I’m going to get him jumped on the steps by yet another group of “fans” who want his blood. Literally.

Poor guy.

I’d hate to think what I would do to him if I didn’t love him.

That’s how I was feeling Saturday with my current WIP, now tentatively titled The Rainbow Child. I spent two days last week doing research, mostly on Wikipedia (I love Wikipedia), linkhopping, reading, pulling bits and pieces of unrelated stuff together and hoping it would all miraculously start to form a pattern of sorts. At that point, I was 15K words into my WIP and still wasn’t entirely sure where I was going.

I had a rough idea for a city to base my location on, but I didn’t want to use the actual city itself because 1.) I’ve never been there, and 2.) I would be changing things about it. A LOT of things. I was more interested in the actual location of the real city (a northern city on the east coast of the U.S.) than the city itself. The city of my world would be two cities, one built on top of the other. The upper city would be clean, modern, and sterile, while the lower city would be a dark, brooding world filled with the worst of humanity. It wouldn’t be underground, just under the upper city. Sort of buried in a system of overpasses, train tracks, platforms, and hi-rises.

The allegory of the two cities is obvious - heaven and hell - and important to the story because my MC lives in the lower city and spends part of his life in hell (literally) because he’s a demon. However, he’s also (unknowingly) been touched by grace, which I now know is the central point of the story.

Anyway, all this random information was rattling around my mind, just bits of flotsam and jetsam floating through my internal hard drive, and then Saturday morning I woke up and realized the mind elves must’ve been at work organizing and filing everything in its proper place.

It was all there. The name of the city, its history, how it looked, smelled, sounded. I could see the streets in my mind, feel its pulse, taste the air in the back of my throat. It was awesome!

I couldn’t type fast enough. I spent all day Saturday writing about the city of Erebus and the people who live there. Like any background material, most of it will never make it into the book, but it’s important to have it so I know the lay of the land. By doing so, I also brought the world of my characters into sharper focus. I was able to detail all their lives and motivations, thus enriching my plot and subplots.

As a writer, I live for “Aha” moments like that. It’s like bringing a new baby into the world. Unfortunately, all that time spent on background took away from the actual writing, but sometimes side trips like that are worthwhile.

The WIP is now rolling along, at 20K and counting. Time to get back to work.

We’ve all heard about and experienced the pain and frustration of blank-page writer’s block, the middle-of-book blahs, the homestretch resistance, and the end-of-book blues.

Well-documented and analyzed to death.

The thing that concerns me today is the filler. You know what I mean — you outline your major plot points, you know your ending and a few subplots you want to develop, but what do you do with the stuff in between?

There are some writers who are masters at this. You read their books and you would never know that some of what you’re reading is filler. Fluff stuck in there for word count or simply to catch your breath until the story gets up off its butt and starts running again.

And then there are books where it’s all too obvious. Where you sit there as a reader and go, “Why is this here and what does it have to do with the story?”

Maybe it’s because I don’t want to write that kind of book that I have so much trouble with filler. Like right now. I’m at one of those points in my current WIP when the opening drama has just reached a lull and I’m about half a day (story-wise) away from all hell breaking loose.

So what do I write? Mundane day-in-the-life-of my MC filler, or throw in another hurdle that could lead to a new subplot? And if I do that, how will I connect it to the rest of the story?

It’s doubly hard when you’re chomping at the bit to dig into the all-hell-breaking-loose phase. I know a lot of people say just go ahead and write the next stuff and come back to this, but I can’t write that way. I have to have something there, even if it’s just a few sentences to kind of outline the action at that point. In this case, I have nothing. Nada. Zip.

Very frustrating. I’ve even tried re-reading passages from some of my favorite authors, watching similar type movies. I don’t want to copy them, just hoping something will trigger an “aha” moment.

So how do you cope with fillers? Ignore them and keep going, pace a hole in the floor like a neurotic mess, or some other, more productive method?

I’m 15K words into my new WIP, the as-yet untitled tale of Cole the half-demon. I’m trying some new stuff in this one (as far as format is concerned). I don’t know how well it’ll work, but what’s the fun of being creative if you can’t be, well, creative?

I might have some good news later today. Fingers-crossed. Anyone out there who has a few spare minutes to do nothing, cross a finger for me today, okay? At this point, I can use all the help I can get.

It was the summer of ‘69 and American was deeply entrenched in the Vietnam War. The streets were alive with anti-war protesters, the smell of pot, and flower power.

Make Peace, Not War was the slogan of the day.

Three of my friends were packing their van to drive 1600 miles to a rock festival in upstate New York. I begged my parents to let me go with them, but there was no way my father was going to allow his 16-year-old daughter to run off for a week with a bunch of “dope smoking hippies.”

Little did I know at the time I was about to miss the music event of the century. Forty years later, it is still one of the biggest regrets of my life.

In the coming days, you’ll probably hear a lot about Woodstock, what with this being the 40th anniversary of the three-day festival on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York. If you were around then, you remember what a big deal it was. If you were an attendee, you no doubt recall the almost naive spirit of brotherhood that allowed such a huge crowd of people to come together without violence or major problems.

In the first days after the festival, the things we remembered most about Woodstock, other than the 32 acts who comprised some of the biggest stars of rock’ n roll at that time, were the massive traffic jams, the rain, the lack of toilets, food and first aid, and the blatant drug abuse.

Remarkably, with that many people crammed into such a limited space under difficult conditions, only three deaths occurred, and of them, only one was drug-related. On a more positive note, two babies were born. Can you imagine their story?

Promoters had anticipated 100,000 people would attend, but by Day 1, 186,000 tickets had been sold and the New York State Thruway closed due to unrelenting traffic. When the fences finally came down that night, it was estimated over half a million people had crowded onto Yasgur’s Farm to celebrate love, life, and music.

Today a totem pole stands in the center of the concert field with wood carvings of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jerry Garcia. If you listen carefully, you might still hear their spirits singing on the wind.

In 1997, Alan Gerry purchased the site and 1400 acres of the surrounding countryside and built the Bethel Woods Center of the Arts. A museum contains film and interactive displays, text panels, and artifacts from the Woodstock festival, its significance as the culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, and the legacy of the 60s and Woodstock today.

There are a number of events planned, both at the Bethel Woods center and around the world, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the greatest rock festival ever held, but for those of us who remember it firsthand, the best way to commemorate it is by showing each other the same feelings of love and brotherhood that characterized the half a million people who came together for a little music festival in the summer of 1969.

Peace.

Whatever it may be, I think we all have that one thing we try to pull off. For me it has always been making what is essentially an antagonist sympathetic enough to be the hero.

Jeff Lindsay managed this remarkably in his Dexter series. To make us all root for a serial killer, well, all I can say is, I’m jealous. I tried to do it with far less success in my own book, Being John Bland, which I worked on off and on for nearly a dozen years, but I never quite managed to make John anything more than a mean, self-centered man. He was more the Underground Man than Dexter.

Serial killers have always held a love-hate fascination for me, as they do for a lot of people. We fear and despise them, and yet wonder what makes them tick. As writers, probing those minds, getting to the meat of their motivations, can become an obsession. I remember starting a novel back when I was in high school about a serial killer telling a priest his own story on the night before his execution. Heavy stuff for a 16-year-old to be writing, but I was living through the Charles Manson-Sharon Tate era at the time.

Anne Rice pulled off the sympathetic evil guy nicely in the Lestat books but those were supernatural characters, and while I write and read supernatural, to me, the real deal – the human killers – are always scarier. Let’s face it, what we as humans do to each other is far more cruel and frightening than anything the paranormal world could dream up.

At least, I hope so. I may write about the things that go bump in the night, but I’d be the first to hope most of them exist only in our imaginations.