Ah. Another year beckons, as we get ready to kiss this one goodbye. Actually, we have a few weeks left to go in this year but I'm going to pretend that I'm writing this at five minutes to midnight on the thirty-first and somehow it's almost dawn even though it's the middle of the night. This way I can seem more profound. Hey, I told you, this column is called "Pretentious Twit" and not "Often, I Make a Lot of Sense". There's a reason for that.
That being said, the quicker we dispense with the usual clichés, the quicker I can get back to making stuff up as I go along or talking about things that nobody cares about. So, for the people in the cheap seats, here goes: "Boy, it seems like we were just doing this." "Let's take a look back, shall we." "Gosh, time does go by so fast." "One time, I woke up to find my room full of monkeys."
Um, well that last one isn't really a cliché. But I find myself thinking it a lot. Ahem. That's the risk of doing this without a safety net. Moving on!
December always puts me in a reflective mood for some reason, probably the psychological weight of "The Year Ending!" which really isn't ending so much as we're all agreeing to follow a common demarcation. What always used to amaze me as a child was going to bed on New Years Eve and waking up the next morning . . . and nothing was different. The sun was the same, the sky was the same, everyone out there was the same, only the year on the calendar had changed. In fact, one year, when I was first grasping the concept, I had assumed that the year changed with every month. My parents had to patiently explain that one to me, not the first time I didn't exactly grasp things the first time out. As I got older and began staying up later, either at home or out with friends, there was a great holding of breath as the midnight hour approached, a simultaneously relaxing as it hit (or the ball dropped, depending on your evening entertainment) and then . . . again, nothing. You want to step outside and expect everything to be different. As fast as things seem to move sometimes, the sweep of history just feels so slow at times, where the big changes I want to see won't happen for like five hundred years and even the most optimistic outcome suggests I won't be around to see it. So when you draw a line in the year, part of me expects that things on one side of the line won't be the same as things on the other side of the line. Which isn't really true. Time is, as far as we can perceive, fairly fluid, and any segments we divide it into are for the most part self-imposed.
That said, I think we can expect some changes over the course of a year. Nothing ever remains totally static, it just doesn't all happen on the same day. We may not have the flying cars yet but we're getting there. So here we arrive, twelve months after I last did this type of self-indulgent rambling missive. I don't think I'll make it so tediously personal like I did last year and just stay on-topic, as difficult as that is for me sometimes. I'm sure if we all sat down together and went through, we can go through all the things we hoped to accomplish this year and see what we managed to pull off and what's still pending and what we'll never pull off. The last category there is my least favorite and I try to limit the number of things that wind up in there. Still, I think it's safe to say I won't be walking on the surface of Mars any time soon. Just a hunch. Though it would be nice if they got someone there. As a brief tedious aside, I remember being crushingly disappointed as a child and reading about the Moon landings and wondering what other planets we had landed on, because if the first landing was in 1969, then by God we should be all over the place by now. And when I discovered the Moon was it . . . geez, what a let down.
But that's neither here nor there. Like I said, I'm trying to stay focused here. We all have goals, long-term or otherwise and the onset of the New Year is a good time to set them, in an attempt to set the tone for the coming twelve months. We can do it any time but as I noted, the coming year seems to be a good dividing line between "what I did" and "what I'm going to do." We could do it all tomorrow, right? Sometimes it doesn't feel like you accomplished a whole lot, when the truth lies somewhere else. This is the first year in quite a few years that I don't have a complete novel under my belt. But I did finish nearly two hundred thousand words in "Time Falls Away" and managed to cross the mythical million-word mark that I alluded to last year (crossed it early on, actually, in like March). Which is a slow year for me, but it's been a busy year with work and everything. So while the novel isn't done, it's that much closer to actually being done, which is a step in the right direction. That's the problem with setting goals, you have to choose them so that they're reasonable (but not so easy that they aren't any kind of challenge at all) and yet not so difficult that they become next to impossible and you get discouraged easily. I didn't have any illusions that I was going to finish the novel this year. The best I can hope for and this is a tentative goal for the coming year, is to wrap up part two finally, hopefully before the summer. Then I'm going to take a little time off from it and work on some other, smaller arcs of stories, in order to recharge and retrench.
Which I think is a good professional gameplan, although by "professional" I mean "strictly amateur" as I still have no plans to even attempt publishing, barring someone knocking on my front door, walking into my house, plucking one of my novels off the shelf and offering me money to print lots of copies of it to sell to people. I just don't have the time. That aside, as writers I think we have to keep these goals in mind. Not so much the publishing aspect of it as the writing aspect of things. You have to keep moving, like sharks in the water. Always have some idea of where the story is going or what you're going to write about next. It doesn't even have to be anything concrete. Some people are like me and carry like six stories plotted out in their heads the whole time, while others are more freeform and have just ideas that are waiting for the right time to coalesce completely. But I think writing is one of those things where you don't just have one story in you. Granted, you may only have one good story in you initially, but the only real difference between a good story and a bad story is execution. And every story is potentially someone's favorite, regardless of what the critical consensus is. So nobody has any excuse not to get down whatever is clanging around in their heads. Which is the goal I think everyone should have for the new year, for every year after that. Get it down. Somehow. Writing, typing, smoke signals, if it's rattling around in your brain, commit it to something semi-permanent. It's the hardest part and the hurdle that ninety percent of the people out there can't overcome. One of the benefits of the National Writing Month that takes place every November, where aspiring writers are challenge to get down fifty thousand words in thirty days, is that it convinces people that it isn't that hard to put pen to paper. Granted, it leaves out the part of writing that involves a thing called "craft" for the sake of sheer volume but as I said, once down, the hard part is over. You can edit and revise and tinker to your heart's content once that step is accomplished. But it needs to be there first.
I know that a lot of people reading this are finding this advice redundant, since to them writing is simply an extension of what they do. But other people still need to be convinced I think and to that end, hey, I'm just doing my part. At some point we should do a survey of all the people who come and visit this site, just to see how many of them can be broken down into writers, pure readers, and someday-I-want-to-be-a-writer(s). The percentage of people who come here to be inspired as opposed to those who come just to be entertained. And which of those that did come here to be inspired, how many did read some of the stories here on this site and finally get the impetus to write themselves, even if they stared at it when they were done and thought, "Well this is no good." Well, maybe it wasn't. But the next one probably won't be as bad and eventually they won't be bad at all. I'd like writing to be sort of a viral thing, because that's how I started, reading the works of other, far better writers and having the hubris to go, "Well, damn, I can do this" and taking it from there.
The end of the year is a good time for a pep talk. Don't let another year go by without getting something down on paper. You're not going to get better unless you start. The time is now! Boy, I should be coaching a team of misfits and bringing their disparate elements into a unified force that will take down the undefeated crew of three hundred pound bruisers in a heartwarming yet comedic montage that depends on everyone working together and putting aside their differences, taking my teachings to heart. Thus we win and I get Gatorade dumped on my head as everyone laughs in a freeze-frame. And the main cheerleader will be attracted by my sensitivity and drive and fall in love with me. Until she finds out I'm a writer and decides to stick with someone more normal. Like a circus clown.
So! The website. How about that? Now that we've brought my insecurities to the surface in an inappropriately humorous manner, we can move on to business at hand. This is my third time doing this and both times before I've complained that there is simply too much stuff on this website for me to read fully. And yeah, I'm going to complain about it again this year. Somehow the website keeps expanding and each update has more and more stories added into the archives. Where once it was the case where we'd post three stories to the site and I thought, "Gee I could critique all of these", there's no chance of that now, unless I wanted to give up my day job and all of my hobbies and simply write for this place full time. Except I'd run out of money and starve eventually, and I think the people here might get a little sick of nothing but me all the time. Still, this is all a good thing. Not the part about me starving, but I remain impressed as year in and year out the website manages to attract a decent number of not only stories but quality stories. Sure, if you open the floodgates on the Internet you'll get all kinds of people who think that just because you throw a bunch of words together, you've got a story. But the people who submit here like writing, you can tell, they want to tell stories and they want to tell good stories. And I can appreciate and admire that.
It feels wrong to just go over one story with each update. I really feel bad about that. I wish there was some ultra-sincere font I could use to get that point across but you'll just have to take my word for it. I probably said this last year and if I'm repeating myself, sorry, but it bears repeating . . . I wish I could go over every story that's posted on this site. I try to pick ones that strike my fancy and give me something to write about for a few pages, but it's not like I'm cherry-picking here. For every story I do use as the focus for a column, there's probably four more that I could have used and didn't, simply because there is no time. A lot of updates I barely get a chance to read more than the titles, relying on others to point me toward stuff or just hoping that blind luck will have me strike gold on the first story I read. It's too much. It's fantastic. A lot of good stuff is passing me by and that bothers me. If I had the ability to stop time, getting everything properly processed here is one of the things that I'd get done while I was trapped in that time bubble. It's not like I'd have a choice, since chances are if I left my house all of the time-space continuum might collapse. Which is a big oops.
What also strikes me this year is the sheer variety of material being posted. This site started out a few years back as being more SF and fantasy oriented but just going by the stuff I've reviewed in the past twelve months we've got fantasy, SF, genre fiction, horror, bits of the supernatural, experimental stories, the whole gamut. Which I think is better than anyone ever hoped for, because I'd hate to see this site get pigeonholed as a place where only stories about dudes with pointy ears and chainmail were allowed. It should be and is a home for good writing, regardless of genre. And I think browsing over the categories and the stories in the categories proves that beyond any doubt. Not every story will be to everyone's taste, but so what? Every tale will be someone's favorite. Do you like every story in the bookstore, or every tale in an anthology. You find what you like and it will teach you more about what you like and what you don't like. I've read some of these and expected not to like the story and been pleasantly surprised. I'm not going to lie and say I've fallen in love with everything I've read here, but the hit-miss ratio is definitely skewed toward the "hit" part. And the times when the stories don't really grab me, I tend to be in the minority. Which probably says more about me than anything else.
The Shared World stuff really exploded this year. Due to the same time constraints that keep me from reading every story on this site and romancing every available lady in town, I don't get involved too much with the shared world discussions, although I am on the e-mail list and thus am privy to everything that goes on. And boy, were they active in the latter part of the year. I'll leave it to them to reveal what's what when they decide to but a lot of it was rather exciting and I probably wasn't aware of everything going back and forth, since I'm sure a lot of private e-mails were exchanged. So even if I saw only a tenth of the proverbial iceberg, when things finally do ramp up fully, the results should be interesting to say the least. It's a part of the website that sometimes gets lost amongst all the other stories vying for the reader's attention, but if you have an interest in fantasy or want to get in on the ground floor, the time to slip in is probably now. Revisiting their progress at this time next year should be at the very least illuminating.
Seeing the Shared World people interact gave me hope toward a minor hope of mine regarding this site. Namely, that the writers would form a bit of a community and trade ideas back and forth, playing off each other. I would like nothing more than each update to become a game of "one-upmanship", where the writers basically draw lines in the sand and say "Come on, can you beat that?" Where they inspire each other and push the other stories to greater heights. Everyone here is good, there's no question about that, but I don't think I'm saying anything startling when I say they could be better too (and I include myself in that approximation, I'm so far from the skill level I want to be at that I think if I wasn't so delusional I'd give up writing completely and join the circus or something). And the way to get better is not just to write and write often, but to absorb all the influences around you and process those influences and synthesize them into something greater. And we can all learn from each other, because every person brings different skills to the table, skills that we can all adapt for our own uses.
It'd be a very organic form of a writing workshop I guess, nothing very formal and there'd be no way to tell if it was really happening or not. I hope it is, in some small subconscious fashion, as part of the ongoing processing of all the information the world flings at us every minute of every day. The writers here probably aren't a real unified group, going purely by the stories posted here. And we'll never know if the writers of a like bent are forming small groups and exchanging ideas and criticisms on a semi-regular basis. It'd be nice if it were public, because I think seeing the authors trading comments back and forth would coax people to make more comments but the bottom line is that it's not easy work to give someone a good review of their story. It takes me a good week to work up and write up one of these here column things and while it can be said that I might go a bit overboard, giving a good review takes time. But as times goes on I think we'll see more and more connections being forged as the writers take the time to reach out to each other. At least, in my world, they would. Alas, we only have this one, as it were. As wondrous a place as the Internet is and how it seems that it brings people together, it's deceptive. Because while it's easy to meet people and connect with them here, it's just as easy to walk away and pretend they never existed. Like anything else, you have to work at it, but first you have to find out if it's worth working toward. I think it is, but that's for the writers themselves to decide. I do my bit here, and that's all I can do, really.
Looking back, I'm more or less satisfied with the individual columns that appeared this year. I tend to go over them a few times before submitting and I generally don't write until I have a well-formed idea so I don't have many regrets once it's sent off. The one wish I do have is that I could eventually skew them more toward "critique" instead of straight "reviewing" which is what I do now. To me, reviewing is the easy way out because it requires less effort, I'm just telling you how I feel about such and such a part of the story and how it affected me and so on. Which is good, but it's not good enough. Because to critique something requires much more on my part, a sense of research, that I'm trying to delve less into what I like or dislike about the story and more about what I think the story is trying to say and how it relates to us. Picking the details apart and seeing how the machinery fits together. Because while it's important to talk about how a story affects us, I think it's more vital to discuss why the story affects us the way it does. And to do that requires a bit more of a peek under the hood, so to speak. I've been trending toward that distant goal for the past few years and I think year, especially in the latter columns, I came closer than I have before. But it's still not the well executed work of critical analysis that I'd like it to be. And maybe that will never be the case, simply because I don't have the time or the depth to do that type of writing. But I'll try, I suppose, and that's all I can really do.
I don't have much more to say, which I'm sure is something you rarely hear from me. I've gone on a bit longer than I expected but I've always hated trying to wrap things up. How do you sum up the year then? "More of the same" doesn't really seem to cut it. Some things progressed remarkably, others still need more work. Some ideas I imagine will be abandoned completely, because not everything is genius, even if it seems so at first glance. But the site is still evolving, goals abound, we've got new writers coming in all the time and the current band of regulars is constantly improving. Nothing stays still, it can't, or it erodes and fades. To pretend otherwise is foolish. The website will be different next year, in big ways maybe, in small ways more likely. Someone will still be writing, because it's not something you can easily stop. Things will be changing and we'll be adapting and that will be how it goes. Yes.
And me? Well, I'll be here, doing my thing. This year and next year and for as long as they'll have me, as long as I can last. But are you really surprised? I'm not. Which is strangely comforting, all told.
Another year down, then. Good job, team.
Now let's get back out there and make everything different.
• MB
12.17.2006
"All your hearts now seem so far to me, it hardly seems to matter now . . ." – Genesis, "Musical Box"
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