Perseverance Furthers

April passed and left behind a fair amount of destruction from the brutal winter she ended. Ended not without one last nasty screw-you moment. Just to make sure the damage done was done well.

Still, a few frozen branches on a beloved Japanese maple and a treasured azalea? Nature's red ink. And lo, after looking at the bare branches of the severely pruned azalea for a month, signs of life. Tiny buds forming on the branches I feared had given up. There will be leaves. Possibly few blossoms next Spring, but there will be life. The Great Editor forced my hand.

May brought warm weather, and with it, the manuscript of my novel. First full edit. Oh, and  the garden cleanup, and the annuals and patio pots needing planting. But get that full edit done and returned. And the month was gone. Passed. Zip. Yeah, it all got done. When it all needs to happen, somehow it does.

Now, as I wait for the return of that manuscript for the second edit (what plot holes will she have found?) I go into the garden and trim off more winter damage, but relish the life that survived the wrath of Madame Nature's wicked long cold spell. If half the lavender died, half lived, came inside to perfume the air, and now spices a jar of herbes de provence.

Just keep moving forward.

One foot, other foot. Always  beginning the next step. Nature does. Can we do less?

Of course a dumbass rhetoric question begs a facetious answer. Of course we can do less. We can do nothing. But, I'd posit, doing nothing consciously is doing something. Even when it's pure procrastination, because the goals, the next post, story, edit, is in there, cooking. You know you'll get to it. You will because it's where you're going. It's what you do.

If I must catch the newest episode of whatever twisted mystery has me in its thrall, or if I must, again, attack the relentless growth of thistle and vine, it's all fodder. We gnash our teeth, we could do more, write more, pull more weeds, plant more seeds. And we do.

The I Ching, ancient book of Chinese wisdom, repeatedly says "perseverance furthers." Today is the first day of the rest... oh, never mind. Start again. Keep going.

To my friends who feel stalled, stymied, blocked, take it as conscious down time. Keep on truckin'.

Perseverance furthers.

How Do You Measure Success?

Have you done what you set out to do? No, really. Have you?

If what you set out to do was to top the NYT bestseller list for six months, chances are, you've failed. If it was to have your brilliant work optioned AND green-lighted for a major motion picture, well... Short-listed for the Pulitzer? No? Please step out of the arena.

Bob Dylan once wrote, "She knows there's no success like failure, and that failure's no success at all."

In each case above, with a few rare exceptions, the goal, the expectation, almost guarantees failure. So back up, friend.

If you're a writer, didn't you set out to write? Didn't you begin by learning basics of the craft? Did you do that? Sure you did. Can you write a decent sentence? Build a character arc? A story arc? Did you get all that under your belt? Uh huh. That's a success.

Did you actually complete the short story you started? Success.

Did you revise it and hone it and make it better? Yay for you. Yes. Another success.

Did you show it to someone other than your mother/wife/husband/dog? A crit partner? A beta reader? Yeah, now you're humming along. That's brave. That's success.

Did you write another? Major success. It's probably better than the last one, too, isn't it? Check.

Did you set out to write a novel and actually begin it? Did you outline the whole thing? Or grab what felt like a good idea and jump off the cliff with it? Doesn't matter how you began, only that you did begin. Did you? That's huge.

What's even more huge? Finding your way all the way down the road you set in front of yourself. Getting to the end. It never happens without detours, unexpected twists, roadblocks, delays, traffic jams, and, thankfully, stretches of sweet, clear speeding along. But did you get to the end? High five. Champagne.

Of course, since you're a writer, you know it isn't finished. It needs revision, editing, and that will, no doubt, require several passes. But you did it, didn't you? It may not be perfect. I don't think any artist ever believes her work is perfect. Perfect is for the gods. But did you expose it to other eyes, consider critiques, and revise? And revise again, until it felt good to you? And then get brave enough to let it go?

Every day we have successes, but instead of enjoying them and wallowing a moment in the warm light of gratification, we look ahead at bigger things, often things we may never attain, other people's ideas of success, ridiculous expectations, and we miss the fact that we are doing something we love, bit by bit, line by line, character by character, story by story.

Are you a writer, and are you writing? Are you doing something that (when you're not gnashing teeth) makes you happy, deep inside? Do you know what courage that takes and how fortunate you are to be creating worlds and people to fill them?

Sure, it would feel great to have your novel optioned. Land a three-book deal. The Pullitzer. Hell, why not the Nobel? But, on the slight off-chance that those don't happen...

Look at what you have done, what you have accomplished. What you are accomplishing every day. Every well-crafted paragraph, chapter, story.

I'd call all those successes. Wouldn't you?

So lift a glass! Celebrate all your successes.

Of course, I may be crazy, but isn't that part of the job description?

(Originally written for a Speculative Fiction blog on AgentQueryConnect, revised.)

My Garden, My Muse

So, the past couple weeks have been a time of cogitation and clean-up. Time to prepare for the new. New season of growth. New book to write. Hello, Muses?

I'd planned to clean up the back yard, hoping the tree trimmers, who should have come two weeks ago, might have, by now, hacked down the dead secondary trunk of a huge Norway spruce. No such luck.   

So, instead of working in back, I decided to jump into a nasty but necessary job in the front yard. I have a few shrub roses which, if allowed, would grow far too huge for the bed they occupy. They're lovely and decked with wicked thorns.

Now, when I have thinking to do on a project, especially defining characters and outlining plot, I find the garden a great place to do that. If I sit indoors at the computer, I find I'm spending more time thinking about what I should be thinking about. That is, running the hamster wheel. Getting nowhere. But with the intention in mind, if I occupy myself with a manual task, my mind is busy with that and can allow the below-the-surface flow to happen. It's when I don't think about it that, often, the best thinking happens.

What do I mean? Well, those three thorny beauties are sited on a slope, making for unstable footing. Their canes had grown long, thickly entwined, and I tackled them without the bother of walking all the way back to the garage for my gloves.

So, I'm cutting back, hauling out branches, clipping them for the trash barrel, stacking them, pushing them down. I'm sure my blaspheming could be heard next door (it's okay, my neighbors are cool) as those branches lacerated my hands, while the possible antagonist(s) simmered.

I don't know. Maybe it was the satisfaction of taming the bobcats. Seeing the bushes trimmed down and my hands scratched and bleeding. But something popped about that antagonist.

By taking my mind off it, I'd allowed my mind to work on it, on its own.

Not to say who the apparent antagonist will be. What changed for me, what I realized, was that I'd been looking at it from the wrong place. Since this will follow from the book already done, which is a science-fantasy, the real bad guys are . . . well I can't really give that away, now can I? But I'll say that they use and manipulate the apparent bad guys. The active, if not actual, antagonist(s).

So, instead of my wondering which characters should go rogue, I realized that I should let the real bad guys decide. I'm sure they'd be far more ruthless than I would want to be. They might go after someone I like too much to turn evil. Bad for the character. Better for the story.

With the intention in my mind but not in my focus, doing a job I'd not planned to do, which left me scratched and bleeding, something gelled.

Somewhere, I think it was the Book of Runes, I read that one should not be the farmer who goes into his fields and pulls on the crops to make them grow faster. Just keep doing the work.

The intention is there. If it's pulled on constantly, it's not going to grow faster. Sort of like browbeating the muses. It seems the more I demand, the more they remain silent, or wait for my silence to speak.

It was by letting it go that it came around. I can hardly wait to see who those bad guys choose. I already have a good idea.

I'd love to hear how you court the Muses without browbeating them into silence. Making chocolate chip cookies? Steam-of-consiousness writing? Gardening seems to work with mine. How about yours?

Shear Happiness--Cutting Away

Yesterday was Happiness day in a writers' group, and I missed it because I had a date with the outdoors to begin the Spring cleanup. Outdoors. Let me say that again. OUTDOORS!

After the longest, coldest, snowiest winter in memory, the ground is thawing, the snow is gone, and the mess left behind became glaringly apparent. I set the date for the day this week that looked, from the ever-reliable forecasters, to be the best, set the time for my yard helper to come, and, of course, the forecast changed from mid-50s and sunny to mid-40s with intermittent showers.

Ha. As if a gray, chilly, drizzly day would stop me. It's Spring, dammit, and I was committed.

We worked for two and a half hours and filled two trash barrels and four large trash bags with the shriveled lamb's ear, the old hydrangea blooms, and, the biggest task--the ornamental grasses.

I have several kinds, from huge maiden grasses to smaller fountain grasses and reed grasses. They are some of the few things that stay when the rest of the gardens are cut back and cleaned up in the fall. In winter, they are lovely, their straw color emerging from the snow.

But by the end of winter, battered down by snow and wind, they become like those passages that survived all the edits. Until the final cut. The time you need to get out the scalpel, like Hannibal, and slice out the last of the lovelies.

Or, in the case of the grasses, the shears.

Okay, the day was chilly, it did rain, a bit. My back, as usual, complained at the bending and stretching. And it was all pure pleasure. Happiness in doing the work. Happiness in being outdoors, feeling the wind, even getting sprinkled upon.

Where tangled, bent things lay, now just shorn clumps remain, ready to spring into action. And that will come soon enough.

Right now, though, happiness is cutting. Actually having cut. Before, doing, and after. That part of any creative endeavor where taking away, eliminating, editing out, is its own reward. Now I can see the daffodils and hyacinths pushing up.

Or maybe it's just that it finally is Spring!

Spring, The Ruthless Season.

It's been a long and brutal winter, but Spring has arrived, and with it, a time for new beginnings.

Pushing up through last week's snow, the snowdrops are blooming in my garden. The first sign of renewal. Outside, just now, in a browned butterfly bush, a cardinal sits, a tiny splash of bright red in a tawny landscape.

It's been a human gestation period since I've visited this blog. I'm obviously not a dedicated blogger. I read so many writers' blogs, all writing about writing. I don't know more than they. Sure, I have a decent critical eye and a fair mastery of the craft, but I have little more to offer than the thousand other offerings.

So chances are, when I blog, it will be more about being creative. Not just with writing. I don't have any formulae. I just keep working at whatever creative activity needs doing, and aren't they all, in some way, the same? Taking our sense, our vision, putting our personal touch to it, and sharing it?

I've had people chat me up when I'm working my gardens to tell me that they drive from other parts of town for their morning walk just to walk past my home to see my yard and gardens. They have no idea how many failures have gone into it, failures that took serious revision. Digging up and moving plants. Replacing ones that just didn't work. Subtracting and adding.

Not unlike what a draft of a novel requires. Or a painting. A sculpture.

So here it is. A new season. Who knows what will have survived this winter? No doubt there will be plenty of pruning, cutting back, moving, and replanting.

I'll be going through edits on my (soon to be published) novel as I renew and plant in the gardens. Not so much different. What will the editor see that I've missed after a hundred edits? I look forward to it, with a bit of trepidation, as I look forward to what will need fixing up in the beds around our home. Each little thing has to work with the whole.

And that's the thing about doing anything creative, meaning anything that needs your personal sensibility to bring it to life. You get it all out there, make mistakes, and some things don't work and need to be moved, revised, changed, or completely deleted. But you stand back, look at the whole, and realize that to "get it right," you have to cut, move, and replant.

Sometimes that takes ruthlessness. I read once, it might have been Gertrude Jekyll, that to be a good gardener, one must be ruthless. So must all artists.

So here we go, into a Spring that may reveal some serious damage to correct. And how different is that from the novel you're working on, or your garden, or your painting, your sculpture, your song? An artist in any medium has to embrace ruthlessness.

But it's Spring. Ahh. Enjoy what's good and beautiful and then fix what needs fixing. I'm loving the snowdrops. The rest will come, and my shears are ready.

Are yours?

Summer, With An Edge

Summer's here. Wet, green, soft. But watch those blades of ormamental grasses. They can cut like a saw. Ah, that edge, the unexpected tear in a balmy day. The flower you cup to bring close, the flower that hides the bee.

Any day now, the third of the series of "seasonal" anthologies will be released from Elephant's Bookshelf  Press. Following Spring Fevers and The Fall: Tales from the Apocalypse, EBP will present its newest, and largest (two volumes):

Summer's Edge and Summer's Double Edge.

Full disclosure. My interest in the first two anthologies came about largely from my involvement with the wonderful writing/publishing community, Agent Query Connect, an amazing group of talented, caring, supportive, helpful people. Fun people. I wanted to taste their work. I was not disappointed.

Now I'm very happy to have a short story of mine in Summer's Double Edge.

President and Chief Elephant Office, Matt Sinclair, has edited all three anthologies, and, as word has spread, the quantity and quality of submissions for the summer anthology demanded two volumes. Twice as many delicious bites (stings?) of summer, that shortest of seasons, like many relationships. Every good thing must end, right?

Ironically, this has come about for me when I'd decided that I would not pursue the traditional path. That inclination solidified for me into a definite choice when, upon receiving a rejection from an agent on a full submission request for my novel, I breathed a deep sigh of relief.  Whew. No one breathing down my neck but me.

So I've tended my gardens, I've written as I've wanted (which hasn't, for a human gestation period, included posting to me own blog here,) and I've been a happy guy.

I don't know, really, much about this soon-to-be-released anthology, but I can't wait to read it. Okay, I'm kinda excited to see my story in print, too. But if the diversity is as wide-ranging as the previous two, and I can't imagine otherwise, it will be like Mrs. Gump's box of chocolates, only with some very surprising centers.

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?