Are We What We Create?

In the loud and crowded world of the information age, we need, we're told, to develop a brand, gather a tribe, then focus like a laser on staying on target.

Well, I'm not one thing. I doubt you are, either. I don't write one kind of fiction. I don't read one kind. I am as invested in my gardens as I am in my writing. Cooking, too. I never expected my writing t bring me wealth, any more than I expected that of the gardens I've created.

People who walk by when I'm in the yard stop to tell me it's lovely, that they walk by just to see it. Prettiest in the neighborhood. One woman drives to this neighborhood for her walks just to see my yard. That's gratification enough. To share my vision and have someone say, wow, terrific. Well done.

That's all I want from my writing, too. Sure, having a book on the NYT top 10 wouldn't hurt my feelings. Who wouldn't love it? Promote the hell out of it? Absolutely. But I don't need it.

I create because I love the doing of it. I love rearranging words to see what fits best where. I love doing the same with my landscape. Often things that promised beauty turn out not to work, must be edited out or moved. A paragraph, an image, a shrub or perennial, stunted, obtrusive in one spot, thrives as a coherent element in another.

Raised Presbyterian, I eventually discovered The Tibetan Book of the Dead, read the Tao Te Ching, consulted the I Ching and runes, and delved into various mystical branches of many world religions. Who knows what is legend and what is history? Or what comes from enlightenment and what springs from wishful thinking?

With age comes perspective. Every faith believes itself to be the one true path to God, but none can pin down who or what "God" is. Certainly not some bearded wielder of lightning bolts or judgments. I've stopped trying to understand. I accept that I can't know. I can't even know if there's a greater Force permeating all creation. I still kinda tend to think maybe. There's just too much that can't be explained.

Each religion has branded what that is, that concept of original universal creative intelligence, whether called The Way, or God, or Allah, or Yahweh. I can't even say for sure there is one, though I'll hedge my bet. If there is, great, if not, I'll never know. So I choose to live as if it's true, but, as this invocation puts it so well, "in the names of the one who is all love."

Okay, pretty huge jump there, from me and writing and gardening to the mysteries of the universe, and I don't intend to get all religious. But, you know what? It's not really such a leap. Those mysteries inform my writing, my work with my little patch of earth, and every act of creation, however small.

There are hundreds, more, who can instruct on the craft of writing with far more authority than I, or on the ins and outs of publishing. I'll certainly bring up things I see that make me fucking nuts, or that make me need to share the beauty, or the absurdity, or whatever.

I am a writer. I work the earth. I'm fascinated by all aspects of creation. That could be writing as a craft, storytelling, the art of scaring the shit out of you by turning something everyday, something you cherish, into something that might take your soul, eat your children, and turn you into the monster. It could be a miraculous virgin birth as the cover for as miraculous an alien intervention.

So where does that put me? A perpetually skeptical spiritual explorer. Let there be Light, yeah, but those dark places sure are intriguing, aren't they? What's that around that corner? Was it human? Is it here to save us or destroy us?

Let me go into the garden and think about it while I move a few hostas. There's magic the the rearrangement of plants. And words. And body parts.

Damn. I haven't narrowed me down! Guess I'll have to live with who I am. And I'm okay with that.

We are creators, but are we what we create? How do you see the acts of creation?

Platform Is Audience. Think Small. Be Specific.

We writers have so many options today. The world of publishing is changing so rapidly that many of its professionals seem to be riding the waves on inner tubes. We're all in it together, but we're all in it alone. And so, one thing is being consistently stated:  having a meaningful platform is ever more important in this noisy world.

Hey! It's me. I'm over here.

Now I'm sure I'm not the only writer who quails at the prospect. And not knowing how or where to start, a strong impulse is to read more, do more research, which can be helpful (if put to use.) Or a great distraction. Or an evasive maneuver.

So Don't just stand there getting ready.

As a kid, I wanted to do two things that scared the crap out of me: go off the high dive and ride the roller coaster.

Every day at the pool, I'd climb the ladder, stand at the end of the board—only ten feet, but it looked like a hundred—until I'd back off to let the others behind me go ahead. I'd climb down, wait until the board was free, and go back up. Finally, in a WTF moment, I jumped. Scary? Yes. Exhilarating? Oh, yes! I went back again and again, graduating to cannonballs and eventually dives.

But oh, the time standing there, getting ready. 

At the roller coaster, an old wooden one that raced out over the beach toward the ocean, I stood on the entrance platform. Same deal. I watched that coaster leave the station a dozen times at least before I got the courage to get on and ride. Then ride I did, middle car, front car, back car (the fastest), knees braced, no hands.

Sure, we need to prepare, maybe get up the courage. But then we have to do it.

Go ahead—scare the sh*t outta yourself!

It's often the only way to move forward, and the thrill can be amazing.

Those things scared me. I don't think there's a power on earth, not even vast sums of cash, that could get me to jump from an airplane or off a bridge with an elastic cord attached to me. I'm sure they have their thrills. Big ones. I'll take mine a bit more on the safe side of scary.

But being scared of doing something masks itself in all kinds of ways. Excuses. Other things that need to be done first. Too hard. Beyond my reach.

Well, how the hell do I know it's beyond my reach if I don't reach for it? How do you? And there's only one way to do that. Do it.

From the many, one.

Or a couple. Hell, even a few. 

Platform building is about audience. Connecting. Building relationships. We need to brand ourselves (that one is vertigo-inducing), and in order to do that, we need to get specific about who and what we are, and to whom. 

Writers on this topic often talk about the thousands they hope to reach. Now that's more than scary, when your followers could fit in a very small room. But a couple very astute (because I loved what they said, so they must be, right?) writers boiled it down to something more easily swallowed.

Don't go for the thousands. Go for a couple. Who specifically are you wanting to write for? To communicate with? To relate to and to have relate to you?

I mean specifically. What do they like to read? To wear? To listen to? What are their beliefs? What do they love and what makes them crazy? Pick a guy and a girl. How are they like you? How different? Invent people you'd easily spend an all-nighter with, tossing out ideas, comparing philosophies and fantasies. Make those people up, in detail, and talk to them.

A couple of folks you'd really like to talk with and write for, to entertain, to tease with unanswerable questions, to challenge, are a lot less intimidating than a sea of thousands.

So to you, dear readers—both of you—some things I'd like to know: 

Do you think we're alone in this universe? Is God the Force? What are those things that go bump in the night? Do souls return? Do aliens live among us? How do you feel about (name the issue, say, gay marriage)? Is time really a continuum, or is that merely a human way to sort the incomprehensibility of simultaneity?  And what the hell is he talking about?

If those kinds of questions engage you, can we talk? Just us. In this little room. On this very small planet.

But I'm still not jumping out of any airplanes.

A Path to Speculative Fiction

Good Friday. I won't be attending church. Not this Sunday, either, though I hold Easter as a special holiday, as I do Christmas. It's the tradition. How I was raised. Though I would have, no doubt, been at church as the minister's son. Son of a Presbyterian minister, grandson of a missionary to Korea who translated the Old Testament into Korean, though he was born a Ukranian Jew. Tradition.

Truth is, each of our religious holidays brings me to again question the reality behind the beliefs upon which those traditions are based. I was taught early on that, though scripture said Earth was created in seven days and left out the part about the dinosaurs, that the men who wrote those books were using poetic license to paint a story that was, in their experience, beyond comprehension. They didn't even have dinosaur bones or carbon dating to help them piece together how it might really have gone. And that last, terrifying book about the end of the world? More poetic license. It wasn't that my dad didn't believe. He just left room for speculation and interpretation.

Ensuing years opened more avenues of possibility. Between Erich von Daniken, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tao Te Ching, I Ching, and Seth Speaks, and the study of Light Work, I came to question just about everything and rely on no one's version of "truth" as truth. How do they know? Were they there?

Now I can't speak to the "stories" of Hindu or Buddhist or Zoroastrian traditions, so I come by my special brand of blasphemy, though I don't consider it so, through the Judeo-Christian tradition. I no longer call myself Christian because that name has been co-opted and corrupted by many whose beliefs I find antithetical to what I was taught that the man/god that they revere actually might have taught.

Let me repeat that. Might have taught.

But let's go back even farther. What was that wheel within the wheel that Ezekiel saw? Or, for that matter, the voice in that burning bush, or the fiery finger writing on the stone? It's no news that many think there may have been extraterrestrial involvement. No one knows for sure, so stories are passed along by oral tradition, each teller embellishing, until we have a narrative that someone, some group of authorities, proclaims is TRUTH.

Now allow me to go completely blasphemous on you. What if the whole annunciation story is really a story of ET visiting, or even abducting, a sweet young girl in a position to be used to fulfill another ancient story, er, prophesy. Think about it. Angels appearing, celestial music, steady star casting its light for days on a certain place. Sounds like Sci-Fi to me. Monster stone being rolled away, too heavy for one man to move. The dead reappearing. Wine turning to water, as centuries before, the Nile turned to blood? Just sayin'.

What I personally believe isn't really relevant here. Much of what has been passed down may well be true. At their hearts, all the central teachings of various religions encompass similar universal "truths." But not "absolutes." What is also most probably true is that the story-tellers were great story-tellers, and as all good raconteurs do, each put his own spin on events that had happened many years before.

That, folks, is the beginning of speculative fiction.

We don't know. We create stories from other stories and have no real idea where the kernel of truth that no doubt spawned the original stories came from. What do we know about the possibility of life in other dimensions than the ones we are able to perceive? Many believe in ghosts, some believe in the continuance of the soul but not in ghosts. If heaven, whatever it might be, isn't some other dimension of being, of existence, what is it?

One book in my past posited that beings exist on all our planets and throughout the known universe (and the unknown parts too?), but they exist on planes not perceptible to our human senses. Their ships travel on light, can appear to us or not, at their will. As can they. Might they, for effect, appear as various creatures of the night?

We know the tabletop, on close examination, is not really solid. Could there not be a civilization on a subatomic particle in the mote of dust on that tabletop to which that atom is as vast as our universe, and could not our universe be but an atom in the stone in the ring of someone having dinner with a friend? Pretty damn big ring, from our perspective. Even bigger friend. Perhaps a god.

So please, those of you who know you know, who have the answers, spare me your certainty. I don't buy it. And maybe without it, the world is a little scarier place, but oh, so much more fun to think about. And write about.They say what you don't know can't hurt you. Is that true? Think about it.

And Happy Easter!

Blogging, Branding, and Vampire Blood

Another two months gone without a post to this blog. I think it's safe to assume, at least for this extended moment of passage, that I am not a social media creature. Again I ponder what I have to say that would matter. I struggle with the notion of creating "a brand" of myself. Hell, I only recently found that the novel I've danced with long after the ball ended isn't paranormal, which never felt right to me, but more probably science fiction. Well shut my mouth. If I can't even peg the genre in which I've wallowed for these many years, how can I advise anyone else about things writerly? Simple: I don't.


I read on others' blogs on social networking and building platform that one shouldn't set out to build a platform or create a brand for one's self. One should simply identify who his target audience is and write to them. Target audience for the novel that I'd be pitching, should I ever land an agent or publisher? That assumes that the audience for that novel would be the same audience for future works and for the random digressions, wanderings down dark hallways of the mind, that make up the blog posts or tweets. Yikes. Somehow those short 140 character things seems more daunting than full posts, so much more ripe with likelihood of instant dismissal. What the fuck is he talking about? 


So who would be my desired audience? They'd be people who love to delve into the mysteries of the common threads that tie together the hidden (dare I say occult?) knowledge of the working of the universe that runs through all religions and is pretty much equally distorted by all of them. People who are willing to believe, but don't necessarily believe. Everything is possible. Nothing is absolutely true. But mostly, I want to talk to people who can go there and laugh about it, and laugh at themselves. 


Above all, they say, be funny. I can be funny, but I don't write funny, and the kind of humor I like best leans heavily toward the dark and twisted side. Erotic. Profane. Quentin Tarantino. I haven't figured out how to address that in blog posts, especially ones about writing, the writer's journey, querying, and all those things that every other person in the publishing world writes about. 


What do I write about then? What kinds of things would I want to toss around with kindred souls? Let's get irreverent. Was the archangel who came to Mary of Biblical fame really an alien visitor? Was her son, the famous one, really the offspring of a human/alien mating? Are the creatures of the night, the ones of legend, vampires, werewolves, goblins, all alien beings playing on our superstitions, giving us what we are afraid of? Are miracles a simple matter of high-level manipulation of what we perceive as reality? Can we laugh at all those possibilities fooling with us, scaring us, and, alternatively, raising us up? After all, alien doesn't necessarily mean from another planet. Just another place. And just because they might exist and operate on a different level of perceived reality from us, mightn't they be just as prone to extremes of good and evil, whatever those are on whatever scale is used to measure them?


See, there just aren't viable tweets there. Or even posts. Do I believe all that shit? Bwa ha ha. No. Well, maybe. Why not? Could be. What was that wheel within the wheel? Sure is one hell of a lot more likely than humans and dinosaurs sharing the planet together after a seven day splurge of creation. No shortage of scared, desperate hopefuls willing to buy the snake oil. How about a vial of blood instead?