The Book, the ‘Zine, the Net and their Authors

This article first appeared in FANG Vol. 1 in 2005.

There was once a time, just between the rise of the fast-food, fast-everything economy in the West in the seventies and the flourishing of the modern Internet in the ‘90s, when the distribution of one’s  art through amateur media was possible, although it wasn’t easy. The availability of small-press printing methods, not to mention photocopiers and stencil machines, made it possible for individuals to make magazines in moderate quantities – with the assumption, of course, that they’d fill this magazine with interesting material.

All a Matter of Perspective

I've been quite unfair, in this series (of which this installment is the last) in sketching a Jekyll & Hyde scenario of the Writer vs the Not Writer, because we're all a bit of both. At different times, for different reasons. There's a sliding scale between one and the other, see. The goal of these articles is to make you reflect, honestly and fairly and without emotional burden, where on the scale you fall, and whether you're comfortable with that, and what is required from you to change your position.

How many hours do you spend writing in a given week? A given month? How many words do you write in those hours? Would you want to spend more hours writing, and write more words during them?

Why do you want that?

There's nothing wrong with being a Dabbler, who cranks out the odd snippet of story of a blue Monday for the lark of it, nothing at all. A Dabbler is a Writer when he Dabbles and a Not Writer when he Doesn't -- but still a Writer some of the time, and isn't that a fine thing to be? The problem is when a Dabbler dreams himself a Novelist and finds that his habits won't produce a novel in a realistic time-frame and of satisfying quality.

So what should he change: his habits or his goals?

Most of us wouldn't mind firm pecs and visible abs, or a wasp-waist and perky boobs (and in some cases, curiously, both) and almost all of us could have that if we ate what the books told us to eat and nothing else and spent an hour at the gym really working ourselves to the bone every day for three years. Some of us do it, and some of us don't. We look at the dream, assess the value it has for us, then look at the actions required to attain it and the effort they cost us, and we compromise. We all have lots of different dreams, after all, so is this one worth that much effort?

We can't write all the time, we'd never get anything else done. Every prophet in his house, to each its season, and all that malarkey. Now is the time to do the dishes, now is the time to study, and now is the time simply to snooze and relax for a bit. There are only so many hours in the day and we must each decide how ours are best spent.

We have obligations, voluntary and necessary, financial and familial, that require us to commit a great number of those hours. Such is the way of adult life, but even then, the responsibility to mediate between commitments and liberties is entirely ours. And it's up to us to define the value of time, as well.

Is twenty minutes' standing commute to work in the morning a time when I can write? And on the way home? Can I get in the writing groove if I know I can be interrupted at any second? If my muse fails me, should I just leave her to rest for a few weeks or months until she loves me again?

I've made fun of these questions, but they bear serious thought. If you only write sporadically, can you fulfill your dream of having A Novel published? Not likely, mate, but that isn't the end of the world.

If the circumstances of your life, your preferences, your habits and your values don't permit you to invest the time and energy to write a novel or to become a prolific short-fiction creator, then you really, really need to chill the fuck out. You don't have to stop writing altogether, just don't burden yourself with such expectations. Writers' block: same deal. If your wheels are stuck and skidding in a snowdrift, take her down into lower gear and ease back on the road. You'll feel better, and who knows, that might be just the thing to help you get back on the highway to novelizing.

However...

If your goal means a lot to you, and you don't want to quit, then you'd best get out and run on your own two feet, no matter the cold and ice and bears. Confront the Not Writer in you and tell him he needs to watch his fucking step -- or else. Practice discipline. Figure out ways to use the dead time in your day for writing, block out a half-hour every day (and more on weekends) to do some writing, and don't ever tolerate any excuses from anyone, least of all yourself.

You're exhausted? Tough shit, bitch. Go write the story of your exhaustion, even if it's only a page or so. Your sister's getting married? You'd best get up an hour earlier then, you maggot, if you want to get some writing done today. Forgot your laptop, and is your cellphone out of juice? Order a cup of coffee and ask the waitress or bus-boy if you could have a few pages from their notebook and a Bic pen. Watch them flush with excitement when you tell them you're a Writer, and see their eyes sparkle as you instantly become 15% more attractive -- and believe you me, that's a SCIENTIFIC FACT.

Every day is a battlefield between the part of you that is a Writer and the part that is a Not Writer, every day a fresh conflict. If you let the Not Writer win too many battles, you're a Not Writer. If you hold your own, you're a Dabbler -- but if you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning and know, honestly, that the Writer won the battle yesterday and the day before and will almost certainly win today and tomorrow as well, then baby, you're doing it right, and you know what you are.

And sooner or later you're going to find that you love it.

Not just the satisfaction of having the words just flow when the spirit moves you. Not just the thrill of finishing a piece and sharing it with others, tittering on tenterhooks while you wait impatiently for their praise. Not just the egoboo of mentioning offhandedly to a stranger at a party that you're a Writer (and gain +15 in charisma, as I mentioned). You'll love all of it.

The exercise of your intellect and imagination to craft the next scene of your story despite the fact that your muse has fled you. The strength you must muster to stave off sleep just twenty minutes so you can wrap up a juicy dialogue. Your ingenuity and fortitude, thumbtyping your magnum opus as you cling for dear life to a handrail in a derailing train and hit 'send' just as it careens, screeching, into the depths of oblivion so that even when the phone is smashed and your bones are pulped you can still pick your story right up where you left off as soon as your new Cyber-limbs have been grafted onto your brutalized, barely-sentient thorax.

There's no shame in having a few pounds 'round the tum you could stand to lose, none whatsoever, just don't expect people to swoon over you when you flex your unseemly bulges in public. There's no shame in Dabbling for the fun of it, just don't torment yourself with the illusion that you'll crank out a novel when you 'get a little more time' or 'figure out the trick of it'. There's no get-fit-quick pill, and there's no magic bullet for your inspiration.

This concludes this series on the Not Writer. Good luck, soldiers!

- Alex Fucking Vance

 

I Can't Write Under These Conditions

Like many authors, Roald Dahl had a special space in which he did his writing. Dahl's cluttered and dilapidated hut bears all the hallmarks of such spaces: privacy, comfort and focus.

One problem with a creative mind, to put it diplomatically, is that it is a problem-solving machine which is very difficult to selectively turn off. Many of the interruptions we suffer while writing occur when we encounter unrelated problems that require attention. Another, more significant problem with a creative mind is that it requires a certain levity and chaos, making us easily distracted.

For both these reasons there's a lot to be said in favor of a special, personal space, if your living situation allows it. The other members of your household should ideally respect your ownership of your Hut and agree not to disturb you when you're in it, and you in turn should only go there if you truly intend to write, rather than abusing the privilege of privacy simply to avoid dealing with the monstrous people in your hizzouse. Not meaning to be sexist, males in particular seem to benefit from this practice, no doubt an evolutionary spandrel related to territoriality.

Even without a physical space, many writers still create virtual ones that offer similar clarity and focus. A separate user account on your computer which has no shortcuts to instant messaging software, no bookmarks and no files cluttering your desktop, for instance, is a good way to differentiate your 'writing time' from your 'my life is a disheartening maelstrom of desperate chaos' time.

For all the benefits of having a real or virtual writing space, there's a commensurate drawback: you can't always use your Hut when you really, really want to write.

While a Hut can certainly help you be a Writer while you have access to it, you might inadvertently create another opportunity to be a Not Writer whenever you're away from it, and for understandable reasons. You have an idea you're dying to deploy, but it'd be so much easier and better to deploy it when you're back in your Hut. Your notes and drafts are there, after all.

Up with this we shall not put!

You'll do yourself a service by using your creative, problem-solving brain to consider, truthfully, whether you'd really benefit much from a Hut. How many hours a week could you realistically use it? How much time do you spend in your home? How much of that time can you really spend on yourself without impacting your domestic responsibilities? How much time do you spend traveling or visiting friends?

The 20th century saw the greatest increase of individual mobility in our species' history, and much of our technological evolution in the last two decades can be described as an effort to compensate for that. Web-based e-mail and messaging services, cell phones and myriad other innovations all try to bring to life the dream of doing anything "anytime, anywhere", and they don't cost an arm and a leg any more.

Brooklyn novelist Peter Brett wrote 100 000 words of his novel over two years' daily commute on the F line. If your phone supports e-mail (and has a reasonable data plan) you can write chunks of a story in e-mails to yourself, or if it has a proper data connection and web browser you could use Google Docs, both of which you can access from any computer with an internet connection.

Evernote is a massively useful weapon in the modern e-writer's arsenal as it offers powerful and flexible note-taking and editing software on a range of platforms, including cell phones and the web. The iPhone app, for instance, allows you to create text or voice notes, take pictures, and sync them directly with your account -- even with your GPS co-ordinates recorded, if you so choose.

For the old-school among us, the Moleskine notebook continues to enjoy love and loyalty from its adherents and, while the fanaticism is sometimes quite excessive, it's not entirely misplaced. Sturdy hard covers, rounded corners, an elastic band to keep it closed and small-signature binding so that when the notebook is opened it lays flat -- these are details that make the Moleskine a very practical 'device' for writing away from home.

Your Hut doesn't have to be a place, it can be a device, a system, a workflow. A sturdy notebook that fits comfortably in your pocket (be sure to ask the store clerk's permission before 'trying out' any of the notebooks they're selling, or you'll be in trouble). A cheap second-hand PDA or a smartphone with a good data plan and software that lets you keep your in-progress projects up to date everywhere with the least possible manual intervention.

Build a Hut you can take with you, and most importantly, develop a routine that makes your Hut work for you!

next up: Parting is such sweet sorrow...

I had it destroyed

I'm a New Media guy, and as such I'm heavily biased in matters digital. I feel that in the 21st century, in which a common telephone can have enough storage capacity to contain all the text in even the greatest public libraries on Earth, when you can have Internet access every moment of the day, when you can search through the totality of the datasphere in seconds, there's no reason at all why any text should ever be deleted.

When someone tells me "I couldn't make this story work, so I deleted it," I see fucking RED. Well, a little red. Carmine, I think, or somewhere between scarlet and vermilion.

This rage isn't even aimed at the Not Writer specifically, I know plenty of Writers who do it, and they shouldn't. Modern word-processing software, on the desktop and on-line, offers 'versioning' technology that allow easy roll-back of changes so that any section you removed can still be retrieved. With that in mind, it's actually more effort to permanently erase something than to simply store it somewhere out of sight and mind. So why do so many still insist on erasing material that doesn't please them?

The habit, I believe, stems from a desire for purity, a loathing of pollution. The Not Writer feels this more keenly than a Writer -- in fact, the Not Writer believes that this very trait, this particular brand of perfectionism, is what makes him a writer.

Not so, says I.

We would all love for our every written word to be a work of genius, for our every keystroke to contribute toward le mot juste, and the Writer, often, takes pains to maintain this illusion outwardly at least. But he knows, in his heart, that he's a liar. He knows that his studio isn't a pristine collection of magnificent canvases in a clean, airy space, but rather a dingy attic crammed with splotched and ruined scraps of sketchbook paper and cardboard and spiders.

There are no shortcuts, there is no straight path from a blank page to a brilliant story. There's an explosion of prose (an 'exprosion', as the Yellow Menace call it), after which the Writer steels his nerves and hacks away at this jungle with a blunt machete and a bloodthirsty rage. The Writer rinses and repeats.

This is another crucial difference between a Writer and a Not Writer: the Writer knows that he'll have to write ten words for every one that finally goes out. Outlines, notes, revisions, excisements -- none of these increase the word count, some of them actually diminish it, but all of them contribute, ultimately, to the quality of the work.

And what do you do with the offal? The machete-clippings and other trash? Into the furnace, say some, so you can keep your workspace clean -- bollocks to that, says I! Keep it. Tuck it away somewhere out of sight, sweep it under the carpet, just be sure you can find it if you need it.

I used to keep a folder on my computer (now synced online, natch) that I called the Mortuary. All my unfinished, hopeless story snippets, excised chapters, rejected character outlines and sci-fi tech ideas went in there. No organization, no systematic filenames, just a big roughly chronological jumble of files that I could, if needed, search through to remind myself of one idea I'd once had that I might actually be able to use now.

Stupendous is the number of plot points, characters, names and even whole paragraphs that I cannibalized from previously-discarded 'waste'. It's magnificent! Free creativity, and nobody can accuse me of plagiarism -- unless a vengeful Past Alex travels forward through time to sue me, of course. But his passport would be out of date, and under Dutch law I could therefore have him executed, so that's not too big a deal either.

So there's your contradictory perspective on words, to Not Writers and Writers alike. Like the Cybermen, the credo must be 'delete-delete-delete' to pare down your sprawling exprosion to a decent, tight little story -- but the definition of 'delete' must include 'save somewhere'. There's no such thing as writing too much, you can always revise and remove, and the waste stands a good chance of being usefully recycled some day.

next up: sometimes you wanna go...

Always a Bridesmaid

"I have it all worked out in my head."

This is where the divide between Not Writers and Writers is thinnest: Story Ideas.

Creativity, at its core, is a misnomer. We don't actually create anything new, because we're not capable of inventing anything we don't already comprehend: we can't conceive of something we can't conceive of. The actual definition of creativity, as we use it day to day, has more to do with synthesis. Scientists and artists alike innovate by making connections that others haven't thought of, and practice brilliance by figuring out how those connections really work.

A story idea is just that; you bundle up a bunch of stuff you already know (types of people, events, technology, politics, dramatic constructs) and realize that particular bundle feels really, really juicy. If you're into sci-fi, maybe you've conceived of a perspective on FTL- or time-tavel nobody else has done before. If you're into melodrama, maybe you've hit on a particularly poignant emotional crisis and if you're a mystery writer, maybe you've put together an especially stupefying murder plot.

That's what gets our 'creative' juices flowing. We feel the vibrations coming off this bundle of concepts, we marvel at the gleam of the interconnecting lattice, the whole thing thrums with potential and it's a thrill to refine and crystallize that rough rock into the jewel we know is in there.

For the Not Writer, that's all too often where the process ends.

Endless cycles of thought and imagination, talking about it to one's Inner Circle, but nothing goes to paper. And it's easy to unerstand why; you feel an obligation to produce a product that's worthy of the potential you know the idea has. You want it to be as good as it can be, so you don't want to write it any less than that.

Which of course means that you spend all your time Not Writing it.

The sad reality is that most of these bundles of inspiration are quite hollow, once you try to pick them apart. Like the many other disappointments of a grown-up's life, nobody enjoys confronting this when it happens to them, but the Not Writer shies away from that confrontation by staying within the comfort zone of the Idea Phase. The less you put to paper, the better it looks in your mind's eye.

The Writer knows the pain of this confrontation, but bears it stoically, and keeps his tears at bay. He knows that it may be hard, but it brings rewards, and he maintains a positive attitude toward the disappointment. Recognizing the flaws and inadequacies of the idea, after all, is the first step toward fixing them and improving the story, or recognizing that the cost/benefit ratio is such that the idea isn't worth the time.

If you have an idea, write it out!

In synopsis form at first, as a stream-of-consciousness, then break it down into a loosely structured set of notes or dive write in and start penning the first chapter in draft form. In the process you'll feel the excitement and power of the parts that have real value, and also the tinge of inadequacy of the parts that are too weak, too thin. With enough experience, you'll realize what you need in order to bolster the weaker aspects or, worst comes to worst, that the idea lacks so much that there's no story to be made of it in this form.

I love talking about ideas as much as the next guy and very often I'm a Not Writer, overindulging in the idea phase, postponing the outlining and actual writing as long as possible and justifying it to myself by saying that I'm letting the idea percolate and mature in my mind. Often that's true, often it's not, and often it takes me far too long to realize the difference.

When someone tells me their idea for a story, that's wonderful. It's lots of fun to explore a new concept, but unless I know they've a reputation for productivity, I tend to take statements like "This story can easily span three novels, when I write it all out," with a grain of salt.

It's a painful thing to see that a great idea looks like shit once it hits the page, but an idea in your head is no use to anybody else, and while that may satisfy a Not Writer, a Writer has to produce a real story every now and again.

- Alex F. Vance

No Time to Write

"I have this cool idea for a story, but I won't have time to write it until after finals."

This is a perfectly legitimate thing to say if finals are next week, but not if they're in five months. Stress, health problems, uncertainty at work or at home, children -- all of these are legitimate distractions that require careful, prolonged attention and consequently prevent long, solid, intense investments in writing, that's absolutely true.

But there's more to writing than just those intense, satisfying, all-else-by-the-wayside engagements that make us feel like consummate creative titans.

A working adult has very few opportunities to spend four hours at a time doing anything without distractions. There's chores and shopping, there's a day job or study, there's social activities and an endless, structural cycle of little distractions. And there's a predictable incidence of conjunctural distractions as well. Illness, accidents to one's person or property, unexpected changes in employment or home situation -- and anything that can happen to you can happen to your friends or relatives, which may also impact the stability of your daily life substantially.

The Not Writer doesn't feel that he or she can perform under those conditions, and believes it best to wait till they're resolved. In fact, though they'd never articulate this even to themselves, it's almost as if Not Writers feel that writing a little bit under those conditions will actually inhibit their ability to do the inspired binge-writing they see as an ideal.

Like writer's block, many of these excuses are indeed legitimate. Again, serious, unexpected life changes or tragedy near to the heart have tremendous effect on our emotional state and our ability to function, and we're all responsible for making our own priorities.

But rare is the circumstance that prohibits us from feeding ourselves, or bathing, or dressing. We take walks, drive, read, watch TV, play games, hang out with friends -- often in short intervals, true, but those are things we rarely neglect no matter what else is going on in our lives.

To the Writer, writing is like bathing or cooking. The Writer doesn't often put it off entirely; when times are hard and stress is high, the Writer writes a little less per day or week, but rarely nothing.

The surest way to realize whether you're being a Not Writer is hearing yourself say "I don't have time to write." If you have time to say that, you have time to write.

Doesn't have to be a masterpiece, doesn't have to be part of the Epic Ten-Novel Saga you're 'working on'. A quick domestic scene, a little joke, a tragic monologue... there's always something in your mind that you can write and there's always a moment to do it in.

Institutionalize the habit of writing, ingrain it in your daily activities as you do eating, bathing, and masturbating. As little as a hundred words a day nets you a novella in a year -- and when the stars align and the spirit moves you, you can still binge-write a couple grand of brilliant prose.

- Alex F. Vance

Writer's Block

Imagine the scene. Hip youngsters, well-read and literate all, lounging in a diner or cafe and discussing, over steamingly exquisite coffee, the pain of their writer's block. How their prose is stunted, their characters mute, the well of their inspiration dry and dusty. Sophisticated music plays in the background, providing a mellow undertone to their sophisticated, tragic discourse. Thelonius Monk, maybe, or Annie Lennox. M. C. Hammer, perhaps.

"Finally I have the time to write, and now my muse has left me!" they wail, and take another sip of espresso. Adjust their turtleneck. Sweep back their shoulder-length hair, and clean their trendy ebonny-rimmed glasses. "I hope this writer's block passes soon."

Mockery, to be sure, but let me be clear: writer's block is no myth, any more than impotence or claustrophobia. It can be the consequence of psychological stress and cause further stress on its own, it can have serious repercussions for one's personal pride and self-image, a vicious spiral of disappointment and despair.

Thankfully, in reality, it's surprisingly rare. The vast majority of cases of writer's block can actually be classified as a heady melange of laziness and trepidation, or perhaps intimidation. And that's a really happy fact, because there's an easy solution to it.

You ready?

The Not Writer

I'm a writer, and I'm fairly proud of that. I take the craft seriously (most of the time), I've worked to hone my skills, I've studied. Much to learn, still, but that only makes it more fun. Many of my friends are writers too, and I know many writers who aren't friends but still awesome, and I take great delight in seeing people practicing the craft of storytelling with ever greater passion and sophistication.

When I'm asked for writing advice, however, I stop being an enthusiast and become a brutal drill sergeant. From my nostrils spews a venemous vapour called 'pessimism' and my eyes shoot lasers called 'terror'.

"Writing," I always say, "is a sordid beast that feeds on your pride and vomits only exhaustion and self-loathing. Writing," I always add, "leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate..."

Well, you get the idea. I don't talk about 'finding one's voice' or 'research' or 'style'. These are important topics for writers, to say the least, but they're far more personal topics; many writers can solve them on their own and any individual piece of advice offers no guarantee of actually fitting a particular writer's sensibilities. There are of course some stand-bys that never miss their mark: "Read Strunk & White once every six months," or "Let your manuscript 'cool down' for at least three weeks after you finish it, before returning to edit," that sort of thing.

But that's advice for writers, and most people who ask me for advice are not writers. Read that sentence correctly, now: I don't mean that they aren't writers, I mean to say that they're Not Writers.

This isn't a disparagement, now. I don't by any means look down on Not Writers or dismiss them out of hand. Not Writers can sometimes write very well, paradoxically, and often study hard, being very eager to learn.

The difference between a Not Writer and a Writer is the difference between someone who could write and someone who does. A Not Writer is someone who experiences blocks and obstacles and timing issues and lets them prevent him or her from actually writing. A Not Writer may certainly be creative, insightful and capable of writing lyrical prose, but most of the time they're too busy Not Writing to get any Writing done. That's such a shame, such a waste, and that's the reason I so often deploy Tough Love upon those who ask for advice.

"My studies are really intense this semester, I can't focus on anything else right now," says the Not Writer. "I just can't seem to find any inspiration," he says, or "It just isn't gelling for me, I don't understand it."

The Not Writer enjoys conversing with other writers (many of whom, themselves, are Not Writers), seeks insights and techniques and delights in sharing stories of the writing experience and often clearly has an affinity for the craft, but at the end of the day he's spending all his scant free time Not Writing, and Drill Sergeant Alex Fucking Vance holds no truck with that bullshit.

Not to say I haven't been guilty of it myself, or even that I've outgrown it, though I'm twice as hard on myself as I am on others. I've often caught myself Not Writing and, some self-flagellation later, set myself straight. There are times when the words just flow, when the emotions and plot twists and characters spark from my fingers to the keyboard, and when that doesn't happen it feels unsatisfying and frustrating and humiliating. But a Writer mustn't put up with that nonsense.

In what will hopefully be a short series of posts, I'll try to highlight the most common reasons that keep creative, insightful people mired in Not Writerhood, and share my perspectives and solutions, all for the betterment of mankind.

Stay tuned.

- Alex F. Vance

Knotcast Presents: X (I'm on a podcast, yo!)

Couple weeks ago a bunch of the authors who worked on Sofawolf's upcoming anthology X (www.kyellgold.com/x) recorded a roundtable podcast to promote the book and to generally have a good time. And now it's been released on Knotcast!

Since then, Fuzzwolf has spent considerable time and effort engineering together the various sources, recorded across thousands of miles and far too many time-zones. It was a little after 3AM for me by the time we started, I had a leetle beet of bewze in me already.

It was a splendid experience to hobnob with some of the other authors, although not all could, alas, be in attendance. We had a great time, we made very little effort to stay on topic, but it was damn good fun.

Quite possibly the largest number of writers on a single furry podcast. Somebody call the Guinness people!

First to get free booze. Then to talk about the potential record.

You can check out the episode here: http://www.foxstuffers.com/News.html Or look up Knotcast on iTunes and grab the ep titled "Knotcast Presents X".

Peace out!

X: "I am the Lord thy God"

Sometimes you hear about a project that's just so damn juicy, so damn succulent, that it'sutterly irresistible. You find yourself watering at the mouth for it even before it starts. That's how I felt when Kyell Gold from Sofawolf Press approached me about contributing a story to a little project he was cooking up, named X. He hadn't yet fully fleshed out the team yet, so there wasn't a guarantee that it would move forward, and it was naturally to be kept secret, but I utterly, utterly loved it.

A fiction anthology, a nice, thick paperback book, with ten saucy stories by different authors, each devoted to the theme of one of the Ten Commandments, with no restriction on genre, setting or mood other than that it should be good and sexy.

Fuck yeah, baby.

Oh, it was a pleasure to get back in the saddle. Heathen City is a fabulous challenge to write, considering how the story has to be compressed into a relatively small number of pages with criminally little space for dialog, so having the opportunity to really explore a scene and letting characters talk to each other for more than a few lines was an absolute joy.

Once the roster of authors was locked down (including , , , , Whyte Yoté and others) there was a respectful land rush to grab the most scintillating commandments, but I had my eagle eye on the one I wanted as soon as Kyell approached me.

"I am the Lord thy God" has always struck me as such an odd duck in the list, because while the others are all advice or admonishments, this one is a statement. Even with its amendment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" it still rings so powerfully: this is the reality, and therefore here are some things you should and shouldn't do.

I'm not officially affiliated with any one religion, but I've always had a fascination for the liturgy and mythology of the Abrahamic faiths, and I had myself a grand old time delving into some of the lesser-known aspects of Christian history, waxing prosaic on the philosophy of monotheism, the sincere worth and dangerous risk involved in such an abstract, total form of love as faith.

This book's going to be a doozy. An official announcement from Sofawolf Press is still forthcoming, but we've been given permission to brag about it already. These are some fucking awesome stories by some stellar authors, with a gorgeous cover by (who's also doing the internal illustration for my story and one other) and additional interior art by . I'm looking forward to signing my name to this one!

X: "I am the Lord thy God"

Sometimes you hear about a project that's just so damn juicy, so damn succulent, that it'sutterly irresistible. You find yourself watering at the mouth for it even before it starts. That's how I felt when Kyell Gold from Sofawolf Press approached me about contributing a story to a little project he was cooking up, named X. He hadn't yet fully fleshed out the team yet, so there wasn't a guarantee that it would move forward, and it was naturally to be kept secret, but I utterly, utterly loved it.

A fiction anthology, a nice, thick paperback book, with ten saucy stories by different authors, each devoted to the theme of one of the Ten Commandments, with no restriction on genre, setting or mood other than that it should be good and sexy.

Fuck yeah, baby.

Oh, it was a pleasure to get back in the saddle. Heathen City is a fabulous challenge to write, considering how the story has to be compressed into a relatively small number of pages with criminally little space for dialog, so having the opportunity to really explore a scene and letting characters talk to each other for more than a few lines was an absolute joy.

Once the roster of authors was locked down (including ,  , , , Whyte Yoté and others) there was a respectful land rush to grab the most scintillating commandments, but I had my eagle eye on the one I wanted as soon as Kyell approached me.

"I am the Lord thy God" has always struck me as such an odd duck in the list, because while the others are all advice or admonishments, this one is a statement. Even with its amendment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" it still rings so powerfully: this is the reality, and therefore here are some things you should and shouldn't do.

I'm not officially affiliated with any one religion, but I've always had a fascination for the liturgy and mythology of the Abrahamic faiths, and I had myself a grand old time delving into some of the lesser-known aspects of Christian history, waxing prosaic on the philosophy of monotheism, the sincere worth and dangerous risk involved in such an abstract, total form of love as faith.

This book's going to be a doozy. An official announcement from Sofawolf Press is still forthcoming, but we've been given permission to brag about it already. These are some fucking awesome stories by some stellar authors, with a gorgeous cover by   (who's also doing the internal illustration for my story and one other) and additional interior art by . I'm looking forward to signing my name to this one!

NaNoWriMo Ahoy!

Even though I no longer participate in the National Novel Writing Month, I still luvs it to bits. Tonight, at the gong of midnight, gaggles of writers across the globe will pour themselves a fresh cuppa and get down to the business of writing 50 000 words over the course of November.

There's a few folks on the FurRag forum already preparing for NaNoWriMo, and I wish 'em the best of luck.

Tonight, I prance off to a local book store to give the annual NaNo Kick-Off Workshop for the local community. Ah, I so miss teaching! I loved doing the BDB Boot Camp workshops at FC last year. Can't wait to do some more.

Wish me luck!

Books a million

Folks, it always goes the same way.

You plan months in advance, really take your time to prepare and make sure everything's perfect. You keep quiet about it so you can surprise people with it.

Then, a few weeks before the deadline, something happens, or you discover something, that means that all your work is for nothing and you have to do it all over again. Whether this be book formatting, editing, webdesign, writing -- any and all.

Then, a week before the deadline, just as it seems as if you'll make it, it happens again. Start over.

Le sigh.

But we at BDB are indomitable. We knew that Anthrocon would be a big thing for us, and despite everything the Fates have thrown our way, we're actually ready for it. (This mail will only be a quick sum-up; I'll properly give a blow-by-blow when I've had some sleep. According to my calendar, I'll have time for that in about three years.)

• FANG Volume 3 is being published. FI-NAL-LY. It's taken a long time, but it's been worth it.


• FANG Volume 4 is also being published -- but it's changing its name, and will be published as ROAR Volume 1. Yeah, I know it's weird, but you'll understand when I get around to explaining it better!


• The Hero: a gay fantasy novel by Teiran Dragon, who also the popular High School Days series.


• El Burrito de los Muertos: gay erotica novel by Anré Blaireau, sequel to Everybody Loves Luther.


• White Crusade: Ben Goodridge manags to juggle his editorial duties at BDB with a healthy writing career of his own. I fought him tooth and nail for the rights to his debut novel, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi White Crusade. He objected because publishing it through BDB would make it look like he was self-publishing. I told him to hand over the damn book or he'd be out of a job.


• Website's been updated. I know people say that the baddogbooks.com website is revamped more often than it's actually updated, but you know what? I'm kind of proud of that. Behold: the majesty that is www.baddogbooks.com. Go look.


• Free Press Program. I babbled about this in the March podcast, and right after Anthrocon, it'll finally be ready for prime-time.


• All the books mentioned above are now available in Trade Paperback format, by popular demand, through BDB directly, and all will be available on the FurNation table in the dealer's room at Anthrocon this weekend while supplies last, so be quick! The usual $19.95, and worth every penny.


• All three authors of the BDB novels -- Teiran, André Blaireau and Ben Goodridge -- are going to be at Anthrocon, and may give book signings, so ask at the FurNation table when you can find them there, and keep a look-out! Writers love nothing more than to hear from the people who enjoyed their work.

Well, what do you know. Got it all done before Anthrocon. Only a day or two before, but still long enough to actually tell people about it. I'd like to thank Ben Goodridge, the good folks at FurNation, the new Mystery Editor that I'll tell you about soon, and of course you lot. Writers, readers, you know what I mean. Thank you for making BDB necessary, and helping us strive to make it something amazing.

More to come soon!

- Alex Vance
Editor-in-chief of Bad Dog Books

Year of the Bad Dog

2007: The Year of the Bad Dog.

(this message is also available as an audio podcast at Baddogbooks.com!)

When things go quiet at Bad Dog Books, it can mean three things.

One: we're having a party and you're not invited. This doesn't happen nearly as often as we'd like it to. Alas!

Two: we're working very hard on something. This happens all the time. We wish we could have more parties, but between schmoozing, editing, wheeling and dealing we just don't have a whole lot of time to spend just drinking. Usually we end up drinking while working.

But there's a third option, too. That's when we're working very, very hard on things, so hard, in fact, that often we can't even drink. Can you imagine?

You don't have to. This is that eventuality. And we of Bad Dog Books, the hardworking yet comically underpaid Ben Goodridge and the money-grubbing, egomaniacal and always humble Alex Vance, are proud to reveal to you all the sweet, golden-hued fruits of our labours.

 

Emancipate the analogue!

So, I was recording Chapter 4 of the audiobook of kyellgold’s novel ‘Volle’ (why yes, I am a sensationally multi-talented Renaissance Wuff, how nice of you to say so) and I was shuffling some of the pages of the script I’d prepared. Kyell had sent me the text version of the novel and after a good bit of experiemntation I’d settled on the optimal reading format -- 13-points sans-serif font (Trebuchet, cute and legible, thick and spacious), left-justified, indented paragraphs, 1.1 line distance, 8-points paragraph distance, landscape format A4 for maximum line length, thus minimizing problems arising from mistaken predictions about the grammatical structure of a sentence -- when two of the pages slipped out of the pile and I had to hunt through the pile to slip the numbered pages in their proper spot.
I seem to be struck by things quite a bit lately; first music and now this. I was struck by how marvelous the idea is that mere paper suddenly becomes valuable simply by dint of what’s printed on it. Specifically, without those particular sheets of paper, I wouldn’t be able to narrate those sections of the story.
I know it seems trite and obvious, but run with it. I’ve often professed jealousy at the compactness of visual art. When I joined jotun_neko to an evening class at his art school I saw people sharing drawings from teir portfolios and I felt a pang of envy at the ease with which artists can share their work. “Here, take this piece of paper and look at it, tell me what you think.” While proper appraisal of a complicated work of art can take some time, you can form an opinion of most ordinary works of art in a single glance. You like the colours or you don’t, the style appeals to you or it doesn’t, and the obvious faults leap into view.
Not so for writers. Poets, musicians, actors, even filmmakers practice crafts whose products take very little time to consume and appraise, at least a first glance. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, in its splendid Extended Edition Glory may be a twelve-hour marathon, but there are few regular readers out there that could read the latest Harry Potter cover to cover in that time -- despite the fact that that bitch Rowling used double line spacing to make the book seem thicker! For God’s sake, ‘Volle’ is longer than that, and so’s Maranatha and it isn’t even finished yet!



The point is, while making a film surely taes more time and more money and a lot more calories than writing a book (not counting research, such as for travel books), the product is more compact, taking less time to consume. Artists can come together for a night and show each other their work and talk about it, and everyone can show a few pieces and get a few opinions. Long-form writers can’t do that. Reading a longer story takes hours, days, weeks, depending on how you pace yourself and the material takes time to settle.
This is sad, but also fantastic. While I’m a big geek and as an itinerant New Mediast deeply enamoured with all things digitial (I want one of these, if not to own it, then at least for the thing to exist) I’m also a big promoter of the analogue. The voice versus the iPod, as in the earlier post.
Now, take books. Like this fat pile of paper in my lap, which I’m slowly chewing through, intoning into my (digital) microphone, reading Kyell’s excellent story for mass consumption. it’ll be somewhere between ten and fifteen hours of audio material and will take easily three times as long to actually record and put together, but look, I can hold it in my hand. Sure, you may say that millions of books fit on a DVD, but before you can read them you need A) a computer, B) a DVD drive, C) a screen and D) a nationwide electricity network powered by dams, windmills, nuclear and fossil fuel reactors -- whereas to read the beautiful story I now hold in my grubby little paws, you need only your eyes and your education.
Sure, you may argue, the time it took you to learn to read (and in some of your cases, to also learn English aside from your native tongue) could be translated monetarily into a fortune far greater than the cost of a computer (though not perhaps that of the electricity network) but honestly, what were you going to do with those years anyway? Besides, you’ve had use of those skills so often since then that the cost has been amortized to nearly nothing.

Suddenly it’s not such a pity that it takes so long to read a story or a book; it’s quite special. No other medium can contain such a huge amount of information or entertainment in such a small object, which takes so very little to be consumed. As mentioned, eyes and knowledge of the written form of the book’s language are sufficient. It’s almost magical. The Lord of the Rings films may be spectacular, but the books can carry you away wherever you may read them. Beach, bus stop, hospital...

I know I sound lik the Magic Of Reading dude from that Chickenf*cker episode of South Park, but go with it.

Dirt Herding.

Of late, my goal's been to make money and I've really been putting my education and my writerly sensibilities to work, breaking my back in factories and raking leaves and such. The latter got me a cold--yay cold!--and the former got my hands covered in bruises and wounds. When I came home at night the skin on my fingertips was so marred by the dirt and the heavy-duty soap at the paper factory that everything I touched felt coarse, and now I can't see my fingerprints--but that's not important now.
What's important is that I learned a new activity. In sweeping the floor while coughing my lungs out, red-eyed from all the paper sawdust in the air, I noticed while I was climbing across the gaping, chomping blades of The Shredder (guess what what does) that there was a hose dangling from the ceiling, with a gun-style handle at the nozzle. Some of you may recognize this as a compressed air hose.
A world of Newtonian play opened up for me. Blasting the floor with the proper intensity, from the proper height, causes the dust to be blown away in a circular fashion, so to guide the dirt into the proper corner for later sweeping took some skill, which I slowly developed. Blast to get the dirt moving, then shoot past the rim to get the excess back, then step around...
Sweeping would indeed have been easier, but much less fun that this: dirt herdin'. Git alawng, li'l dawgies!

This mode of speech reminds me of the White Wolf Western Omnibus by Hal Dunning -- which has nothing to do with the role-playing games manufacturer, but rather a tawdry Western fiction writer. I picked the book up for two pounds at a thrift shop in Belfast and the style of it is a constant marvel to me.
I write long, you see, detailing the look and feel of things. People, places, motions, intentions, interior dialogue, all that post-bicameral stuff, but not Hal. For Hal, it's perfectly possible for a man to ride into town, round up a posse, head over to Hacksaw Johnson's farm to bring the varmint to justice, hang him in the village square and then go to the Lone Star Saloon to drink to their victory, all in one single page.
The amount of plot in his stories is astonishing to me.
While I was giving the NaNoWriMo workshops at the local American Book Centre, I brought two books to illustrate writing 'short' (Good old Hal!) and writing 'long', for which I had brought my Oscar Wilde collection in hardcover where I had a three-page sentence bookmarked.

Merry christmas, everyone!

FurRag - beta.

"Hey Osfer, have you been a big dirty slacker lately? I haven't seen you post anything--no stories, no LJ posts... have you turned lazy and unambitious?"

Haha, no. Aside from the fact that I'm courting two prospective employers in the real world and that I've been offered a job as editor of a fairly well-known furry publication, aside from the fact that I've started the first of a series of five NaNoWriMo writing workshops I'm giving, aside from the fact that I'm participating in this madness with the full intention of getting the result published--I've been working on a project.

Yes, yes, I know, "you and your fucking projects", but listen, this is a doozy. A sweet and talented coder friend sacrificed way too much of his free time to make some of my more frivolous dreams come true, while the fabulously talented Kamui contributed reams of artwork and the result is this:

FurRag, the definitive furry fiction archive (beta).

Even at 15% of its planned functionality it's already on a par with the functions of just about every other fiction archive out there and there's tons more to come. Despite the fact that it isn't finished it's now been opened to help furry participants in the National Novel Writing Month through the nifty integrated per-chapter and full-story word count and forum integration functions.

Zawesomes, now?

Black and blue teeth.

Dark stains on my fingers and my front teeth, illegible, light grey scribblings on a blank sheet of paper, a wad of tissue paper in the waste basket. A sense of humble achievement.
I pick up a box of cartridges and discard it--wrong kind. I pick up another, nod approvingly and, flicking it open with a thumb, empty it into my hand. Ammunition spills over my fingers, cartridges clattering to the floor, but I pay them no mind. I only need one. I slide it into the mechanism--a solid click--and seal my weapon, ready to fire.

The spare, then, my holdout. Quickly I whip it out, this second, no different from the first but for its colour. It, too, fails me, and I am lost.
Or I would be, were the situation quite so urgent. As it is, I've no adversary in need of smiting. nor am I in danger of being smote myself. But it's important to be ready, and it's plain that I am not. This must immediately be remedied.
I gather my tools and spread them out on the desk and carefully, I dismantle my armaments. I set the pieces apart, on a cloth so they won't roll or slip or otherwise vanish, as small things are wont to do when no-one's looking. I check the cartridges, toss them away and exchange them for new ones. I try again--and again, nothing.

At this point I should make it clear that I'm talking about pens, not guns. The metaphor was nice, so far, but I really can't keep it up. So, pens. Fountain pens, to be precise, implements d'ecriture which I haven't used in a while, having favoured such scribbling tools as the extremely pocketable Lamy Pico, which, for all its portability, is still just an average ball point pen, and a very nice and super-cheap home-brand 0.7 mm rollerball in a luscious dark blue that looks simply sublime on cream paper. Or, in cases where I'm feeling particularly unsure, a mechanical pencil which is styles after a scalpel, to look really clever.

I am, you may observe, something of an enthusiast of old-school longhand. It's a craft I haven't practiced much, a fact which has a chicken-and-egg relationship with the very low legibility of my chickenscratch. As a wee lad I spent my modest pocket-money on pens and markers of different qualities, none of which I ever managed to use to depletion, but which I kept organised in my overstuffed pen box at school, systematically employing different tools for different tasks. Of course, it may also be that I was a spendthrift child with hamstering tendencies, which isn't abnormal, who was so geeky as to be unable to think of anything better to hamster than pens.

In gasps and hiccups, my delight in handwriting has resurged in the last few years. The grudging admission that a PDA simply can't function properly as a data entry device for text, even when equipped with a cute little keyboard led to my stomping off to buy a fucking notebook, and the urge to find the very awesomest notebook available.
This led me, of course, to the moleskine. Which of course needed a suitable writing implement to complement it.
Trial and error in shops (the great advantage with having an obsession with stationery rather than, say, vintage cars is that it's a far less costly love-affair) and on-line research showed that, curiously, it was the cheap home-brand rollerball that was most suited to the moleskine's creamy paper, which brought out the radiant gold in the dark blue ink to make the text truly shine, giving the permanent illusion of wet ink--despite the fact that the ink could withstand even a thorough scrubbing with a licked finger, once dry.
I nevertheless kept an arsenal of alternatives at hand, none of which, I'm now ashamed to say, were fountain pens. This was due to the fact that I selected the moleskine particularly for its ruggedness, to serve as a notebook-on-the-road, which could withstand the rigors of being jangled about in a loosely-packed bag all day and still offer the sturdiness to comfortably write in it even without a flat surface to lay it down on. And fountain pens simply aren't the implements you want to use when being jostled side to side on a train or bus or tram, as I so frequently am.

Still, those precious fountain pens beckoned me. Some two or three years old, the both of them, by no means ancient and priceless only in that they cost next to nothing at the time. Plain and nicely weighted, red and silver, and both, it turned out, thoroughly clogged.
Daunted I was not. Off to the bathroom I went with them, with a stash of tissue paper, a glass and (wisely) rolled-up sleeves. What followed was an hour of careful rinsing, patient dripping, a gradual raising of the temperature, drying, soaking... Not of the whole pens, of course, only of the nib, made, as most fountain pens are, of iridium.
A Platinum Group Metal, iridium is hard and brittle, tough to machine, and the most corrosion-resistant metal known. Given that it's also fairly cheap, this makes it an excellent metal for making pen nibs, which (ideally) are permanently exposed to some fluids. This marvelous metal is fairly rare, having come to our lonely little planet either as a sediment from the cosmic dust that constantly drizzles onto our little globe or, more cataclysmically, as a major constituent of some meteorites, such as that found by the Alvarezes in the late '70s in clay around the K-T Boundary, which became one of the major proofs for the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite.
Ah, but I digress somewhat.
Not that the above isn't interesting--more interesting, at the very very least, than sucking warm water through a fountain pen nib and spitting out the blackened result into the sink. The staying power of that dried, cloying ink, utterly perplexes me.
Of the two nibs, one could be saved; the other, despite my efforts remains uncooperative. The rescued pen is quite weak, still, the presence of minuscule amounts of water in the capillaries causing the ink to be quite pale on paper, but in time, she will heal (the pen is called Martha and is among the few women I have ever loved). Black ink had clogged her veins and I've put her on a diet of blue, so the faded ink is turning slowly from grey to lilac, with blue to follow some time later.

There is something inherently magical and terribly dangerous about writing by hand. There is a finality to what you write that engenders claustrophobia and performance anxiety, for while a well-written page is a work of art, the smallest blemish, the slightest falter can ruin its splendour. Not to mention that it's terribly hard to go back and make corrections. It's only ink on paper, but it might as well be chisel on marble, it's so final and to write anything longer than an essay on a topic you've already worked out, brain-wise, is terribly daunting.

Still. I think I'll give it a go. Just to get my handwriting in shape, and just to train my hand. Should the RSI (or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) I occasionally suffer from in my right index and middle fingers flare to unbearable degrees, rendering me unfit to type for a year or more, I may have to turn to longhand ad my only alternative.

I shudder at the prospect, of course. But perhaps a year of the musty scent of paper and the satisfaction of black ink-stains on my fingertips is not so bleak a future.

Back in the groove.

So, what have I been up to that’s dragged me away from my LiveJournalling duties? Fuck all, is the answer.

Every three weeks or so I play Werewolf: The Apocalypse (soon to be The Forsaken) with the gang, which is an exercise in snack-munching coke-swigging comically violent geekery and always good fun. Intrigue, danger and romance! I shoot crime on a regular basis. I’m far less crap than I used to be. Speaking of geekery, I helped out a friend by volunteering to play an NPC in a Vampire LARP session he organised (if you don’t know what those acronyms mean — you’re way cooler than me) and, while I felt silly, it was a surprising amount of fun once all the players got into the same celestial groove. I yearn for theatre.

Writing, writing, writing. That is, I should be and today I am. Somebody wrote to me in response to my pennings and gave me the best compliment ever — and I quote:

“I fanboy at you.”

The fact that Google lists no occurrences of those four words in thar order makes this compliment extra special to me and anyone who dashes that illusion I will repay by dashing his (or her, one never knows) skull in.

————

Johnny and Jotun visited this evening so I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done. Nor did I get a chance to play World of Warcraft. Curious thing, my mum has recently lectured me on my addiction to that game because she happened to see me playing it on four or five separate instances. Fact is, I can barely scrape together the time to play it at all, between work, school, friends and — here’s a word Orrin hates, kiss kiss — hobbies I just can’t find the time. I’m lagging behind my fellow gaming chums by a substantial degree and that’s demotivating. Plus, lately I’ve rarely had the opportunity to play for more than half an hour without at least a five-minute interruption, which is hamering my progress as well. Also, I’m really crap at this game.

 

 

Hopping on the bandwagon.

1. As a child, got burned by hot tea — but for reasons as yet unexplained, the tea spilled over my side formed a steam bubble under my skin which exploded  so instead of becoming a second or third degree burn it ecame simply a patch of bare muscle where the skin could regrow, rather than a dirty scar. Score.

2. Wrote and directed a play for twenty 12 to 18–year-olds using no sets and hardly any props, with a technical manual that turned out to be twice as thick as the already hefty script.

3. Co-scripted, co-directed and co-wrangled a shor film in Belgium located on a small abandoned trainyard owned by a supposed former Nazi war criminal (this is pure speculation).

4. Spent twenty-two and a half hours editing and colour timing said film in order to meet self-imposed deadline, only to realise, when watching the results after ten hours of not working on it, that it isn’t funn and doesn’t make sense.

5. Taught an insightful and popular writing workshop to people who uniformly had far more writing experience than I did and yet ended up worshipping me as a god.

6. Lived in Holland for twenty-four minus one half year without ever, ever smoking weed or trying any drugs of any kind. Not even aspirin, till I was twentyish.

7. Made no spelling mistakes in English or Dutch at all, whatsoever during exams until puberty.

8. Upon waking up and being handed the phone by my mother, I managed to tell my friend Bart that, no, he can’t come around because I’m not at my mother’s place, I’m at Dad’s, so convinced of this that I convinced him. I noticed that I wa s in my own bed, my mother was talking to me and Bart didn’t have my dad’s number, but by the time this information eased into my brain I didn’t connect it with what I said to Bart and I didn’t call him back to tell him I was at mum’s place after all.

9. During school camp, on the last night, when everybody had decided to party through the night and not sleep, left the dormitory where everybody was screaming and talking and laughing for thre minutes and roughly twenty seconds, only to return to find everyone asleep. All other dorm rooms were filled with people asleep in attitudes of misbehaviour. I went around the farmstead where the camp was organised, turning off lights and alarm clocks and spent three hours doing dishes and making breakfast so the morning crew wouldn’t have to get up so early.

10. Screamed so loud when Wolfie, who is a shit-fucker, sent me a link to a truly heart-stoppingly scary Flash movie in the middle of the night that I woke not only everybody in my house, but also set four dogs in the neighbourhood to barking — while I know for a fact that nobody in half a mile of my house owns a dog.