Ten Years On...
Feb. 28th, 2012 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madwriterToday marks the tenth anniversary of me getting serious again about my writing. I haven't looked back since.
By February 28, 2002, I was in the fifth year of what I think as a "Writing Hiatus", a terribly understated term. It's not that I stopped writing entirely; but from 1997 till 2002 my writing was only sporadic, completely undisciplined, and I was knocking away at a fantasy novel I couldn't get a grip on. The hiatus got started because I was a full-time college student again alongside working two jobs, and I know now that the novel was simply the wrong book to be working on. But at the time I was stuck in a vicious cycle fueling my belief that my writing wasn't any good, and never would be. So I only barely tried--hence the cycle. And I was constantly depressed.
In 1999, I came up with another book idea I liked--an alternate history science fiction novel set in the Roman Empire of the 1st century A.D., titled The Course of Heaven. But my belief that you should finish one novel before starting another regardless of circumstances was absolute, so I fruitlessly and occasionally plugged away at Prior Book.
Fast forward to ten years ago today. Laurie and I were living in Northern Virginia, and for all intents and purposes I'd set aside Prior Book, but had been talking for some while about The Course of Heaven without actually doing anything about it. Finally Laurie sat me down for a brief but intense talk that boiled down to "Start writing it or shut up". When the talk was done I walked over to my computer and spent the next hour knocking out the 1500-word prologue.
The book took me nearly two years to write--I finished it on New Year's Day of 2004--because it was like having to learn writing from scratch, I know looking back that it's a 160,000 word mess, and it wasn't till 2004 when I actually got serious about trying to publish what I wrote. But it was excellent practice, I learned discipline, and over the last ten years I haven't gone for more than a few weeks without writing something. And since then I've written and published short stories, poetry (my friend Mike Allen /time_shark introduced me to speculative poetry, and I started writing it just to see if I could!), book reviews, and the rare essay.
(And I was eight chapters into The Course of Heaven by the Summer of 2002 when I went to see my uncle, Philip Jose Farmer, and thus could use those chapters to "audition" for writing The City Beyond Play.)
There are places in my brain that manufacture dark and depressing thoughts, and they've spent a long time now accusing me of showing few results for years of work. They trot out friends and acquaintances who've been more successful, and sometimes I accidentally listen to those voices. But even at my most depressed or cynical, I realize how much worse off I would've been these last ten years if I hadn't started writing again, a twisted-up unhappiness that hardly bears contemplating. I really don't even recognize myself in those visions.
And if I hadn't resumed writing, I would've never fulfilled my oldest writing dream: Collaborating on a book with my uncle. Now that he's gone, I know innately that had I failed to make this happen, I would've deeply and bitterly regretted the lack for the rest of my life.
So thanks to Uncle Phil for sparking the writing idea for me, Laurie for rekindling it, and everyone who's touched me one way or another while I've been at it. Ten years on doesn't seem so long when I mean to keep at it over the next few decades.
By February 28, 2002, I was in the fifth year of what I think as a "Writing Hiatus", a terribly understated term. It's not that I stopped writing entirely; but from 1997 till 2002 my writing was only sporadic, completely undisciplined, and I was knocking away at a fantasy novel I couldn't get a grip on. The hiatus got started because I was a full-time college student again alongside working two jobs, and I know now that the novel was simply the wrong book to be working on. But at the time I was stuck in a vicious cycle fueling my belief that my writing wasn't any good, and never would be. So I only barely tried--hence the cycle. And I was constantly depressed.
In 1999, I came up with another book idea I liked--an alternate history science fiction novel set in the Roman Empire of the 1st century A.D., titled The Course of Heaven. But my belief that you should finish one novel before starting another regardless of circumstances was absolute, so I fruitlessly and occasionally plugged away at Prior Book.
Fast forward to ten years ago today. Laurie and I were living in Northern Virginia, and for all intents and purposes I'd set aside Prior Book, but had been talking for some while about The Course of Heaven without actually doing anything about it. Finally Laurie sat me down for a brief but intense talk that boiled down to "Start writing it or shut up". When the talk was done I walked over to my computer and spent the next hour knocking out the 1500-word prologue.
The book took me nearly two years to write--I finished it on New Year's Day of 2004--because it was like having to learn writing from scratch, I know looking back that it's a 160,000 word mess, and it wasn't till 2004 when I actually got serious about trying to publish what I wrote. But it was excellent practice, I learned discipline, and over the last ten years I haven't gone for more than a few weeks without writing something. And since then I've written and published short stories, poetry (my friend Mike Allen /
time_shark introduced me to speculative poetry, and I started writing it just to see if I could!), book reviews, and the rare essay. (And I was eight chapters into The Course of Heaven by the Summer of 2002 when I went to see my uncle, Philip Jose Farmer, and thus could use those chapters to "audition" for writing The City Beyond Play.)
There are places in my brain that manufacture dark and depressing thoughts, and they've spent a long time now accusing me of showing few results for years of work. They trot out friends and acquaintances who've been more successful, and sometimes I accidentally listen to those voices. But even at my most depressed or cynical, I realize how much worse off I would've been these last ten years if I hadn't started writing again, a twisted-up unhappiness that hardly bears contemplating. I really don't even recognize myself in those visions.
And if I hadn't resumed writing, I would've never fulfilled my oldest writing dream: Collaborating on a book with my uncle. Now that he's gone, I know innately that had I failed to make this happen, I would've deeply and bitterly regretted the lack for the rest of my life.
So thanks to Uncle Phil for sparking the writing idea for me, Laurie for rekindling it, and everyone who's touched me one way or another while I've been at it. Ten years on doesn't seem so long when I mean to keep at it over the next few decades.
