Let It Be Resolved

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So, time for my yearly resolutions. After all, you can’t very well fail if you don’t set yourself impossible goals, right?

Actually, joking aside, I do like setting myself goals. Well-defined, achievable goals. So, as far as writing goes, here’s what I want to accomplish this year.

1-Read ten (10) new books:

In my pre-fatherhood days, this would have been a trivial accomplishment. Nowadays… it’s daunting. But let’s make it tougher: at least two of those books have to be classics of the “books you must have read before you die” variety. I’m thinking Joyce and Proust, but we’ll see.

2-Write one blog post every week:

That’s pretty self-explanatory. Some slippage is probably inevitable, but I want to have 91 published posts by the end of the year. Yes, this post counts.

3-Be done with Book the First:

That means either finding an agent, or self-publishing the book. I have eleven more agents I want to query on my list (and I’m allowing myself a twelfth if I learn of someone I think is worth a shot.) If I find an agent, great, if not, well, the goal is to have the ebook out for next Christmas.

4-Finish and start shopping the short story I’m currently writing:

This is the next piece of writing I want to finish. I’m almost done with the first draft, and that’s really what I’m struggling to fit in my schedule. Editing can easily be done in small increments, but writing needs long stretches of free time.

5-Take this website to the next level:

This means learning WordPress better, and throwing some cash at the problem. Also, it means figuring out categories, tags, the works.

6-Finalize my plans and start work on the Next Series:

I sorta like my new project. But I need to do a lot of thinking and planning and worldbuilding for it. I want to end the year with that project well on its way.

So, that’s it for me this year. Let’s get cracking!

A Dad and a Writer: Month 5

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As winter rolls in, I’m cautiously optimistic. The baby is growing up quickly, and that’s a much-needed motivation boost. His sleep schedule is also becoming more convenient – he was already sleeping full nights, but now we’re slowly putting him to bed earlier, which gives me more uninterrupted time.

I also think that I’ve turned the corner on accumulated fatigue – by which I mean that instead of finishing every week just a bit more tired than the week before, I’m finally recuperating. In retrospect, that accumulated fatigue was probably also impeding my ability to write in months 3 and 4, so I’m glad/hopeful that’s over.

Hence the “cautiously” optimistic. It won’t take a lot for me to slip back into that energy-deficit trap. Another baby cold, a rough month at work, and I’m back in that low-concentration hell. But as of now, I’m running out of excuses not to write regularly.

Query Report: Back to Square One

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Well, I was about to write this with a hopeful tone, but then I received an official manuscript rejection, leaving me with exactly zero potential leads at the moment.

It’s my fault – sure, the baby has been a massive timesink, but I should have been throwing out more queries this fall. So, with all my queries either dead or stale… it’s time to reassess the situation.

Number of Agents Identified: 25*

That’s the work I’ve managed to do this fall. Twenty-five names of agents that I feel could be interested in reading my manuscript. Figure on maybe another ten that didn’t make the list because I don’t query multiple agents at the same agency at the same time (hence the asterisk.)

Number of Queries sent: 14

Well, six queries in what, three months? As usual, blame the baby.

Number of Rejections/Stale Queries: 14

As specified, by now all the unanswered queries can be considered rejections. One caveat: I’ll go through my list of stale queries and see if there are any that come with a guaranteed reply. Those will warrant a second try.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I received another personalized, “this-is-great-you’re-obviously-talented-but-it’s-not-for-me” reply, in addition to the positive side of the feedback from the manuscript rejection. Those are nice to get, but we’re looking for success here!

Number of Requests for the Manuscript: 2 – Both ultimately rejected

That hurts.

Also, while the feedback I got with the first rejection a year ago led me to do a revision that ended up making the book better… I’m not sure I can do anything with the feedback from rejection no. 2. Don’t get me wrong: it’s certainly something I will consider for my future writings, but applying it to Book the First would entail a full sentence-by-sentence rewrite. And I’m not sure I want to do that.

Final Thoughts:

Hard Truth time: between all the queries I’ve sent, and the feedback I’ve received… I think getting an agent for Book the First is starting to look like a forlorn hope.

Sure, I can probably keep identifying new agents and sending queries forever, but at this point I need to start looking forward. And that means beginning to consider that traditional publishing is just not going to work for my first novel.

 

I’m not out of the race yet. I’ll take the time to prepare fifteen really good, personalized queries over the next month, then ship them out before the end of January. But if those don’t work, I’ll turn Book the First into an e-book and move on from there.

Bonus Creativity: A Sandbox Pathfinder Setting

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I’m an obsessive TTRPGer. When I’m not thinking about books, I’m thinking about games I’ve played, and especially games I want to run.

And one of my goal is to run a sandbox Pathfinder campaign.

For the uninitiated, a sandbox campaign is one in which the players, not the game master, take the initiative in deciding what the story will be. The GM manages the setting and prepares adventures based on what the players want to do, but ultimately it’s the players’ goals that drive the story.

What this means, in practical terms, is that there are quite a few tropes that can’t be put into play. No prophecies to be fulfilled, no apocalyptic wars between gods to win, nothing that the players can’t choose to ignore. The stakes can still be high, but if the players don’t want to get involved with a particular plot point, well, the show must go on.

It also means that the setting must accomodate a variety of activities. If the players want to explore, there must be some amount of terra incognita. If they want to play politics, there must be a theater for that. And there still must be villains to confront, monsters to slay, and so on.

The old AD&D settings were pretty good for that – the pre-Time of Troubles Forgotten Realms in particular had plenty of unexplored (read: unwritten) land to explore and a relative dearth of player-achievement-trivializing fiction. Modern settings, by contrast, tend to be less accomodating. Besides, where’s the fun in using someone else’s creation?

So, over the course of the next few months, I’ll be posting my design process as I create a new setting to play in. I’ll try to go light on actual game mechanics – it’s not really pertinent to the creation process and besides, I expect there’ll be a second edition of Pathfinder by the time I get around to actually playing in that setting. Instead, I’ll focus on the reasons for my design decisions rather than on the rules minutia.

So… in our next instalment: let’s draw a map.

A Dad and a Writer: Month 4

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It gets worse before it gets better.

That “bring a laptop to work” plan? Sure, it helps with the writing (and general sanity), but I have a short lunch break, and it flat out hasn’t been enough to cover for the otherwise increased demands on my time.

Granted, the worst is probably over: my son got a cold and it passed on to my girlfriend and then on to me, and so I ended up losing a week and a half of writing time first by caring for my family, and then by being sick myself. That’s dealt with (until the next inevitable sickness – did you know babies normally catch about ten different colds during their first year of life?) but, well, that’s a third of the month gone.

Beyond that, the fourth month is a hodgepodge of time-eating progress (my son wants to play more, he talks more, and so on – all awesome stuff that’s a nightmare to a regular writing schedule) and tantalizing visions of eventual increased freedom. I see hints of him wanting to play on his own, he’s rapidly outgrowing milk as a sole source of nutrition (the glorious four-bottles-a-day nirvana is fast approaching)…

But at this stage, they’re still just hints. And so it’s yet another day of having maybe an hour and a half of free time spread over the entire day, and of maybe scrounging another minute or so (we no longer have to sterilize the bottles – a dauting three-minutes task off the list until the next baby!)

A Dad and a Writer: Month 3

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So, as is painfully obvious from the posting hiatus, this isn’t working so well.

Don’t get me wrong, being a dad is awesome, my son is awesome, and life has been pretty good lately. But there’s just not enough time in the day to do anything anymore!

I’m not worried too much for the long term – we’ve secured a spot for the kid in the quite-awesome Quebec daycare system, so starting from next summer I’ll have entire days free for writing every week. And really, in a few months we’ll be out of the need-constant-attention phase, so I’ll be able to scrounge an hour here and there. But for now… even throwing a quick blog post together is a challenge.

… which means it’s time to adjust. Starting from now, I’m bringing my laptop to work. A thirty minute lunch break isn’t long, but it’s enough to get a few sentences out every day. And it’s really what I need – constant progress every day, so that I’m also motivated whenever I get time at home to write. Because right now, it’s hard to find that writing drive.

Hopefully, we’ll see that word count creep up soon.

 

Wordcount: 1392

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Eight hundred words in three weeks? That’s… not gonna cut it for novel-writing.

Good thing those new words are in a new project, then. Specifically, I’m writing a sci-fi short story.

My reasoning is simple: I figure I should probably focus on a shorter project I can actually complete in the next few months, since there’s no way I can make meaningful progress on Book the Second while also juggling queries, my day job and a baby. I figure I can finish a first draft of the story by the end of November, then blitz the editing in time for Christmas.

As to the story itself – unlike my first novel, which is straight up commercial fiction, this is definitely more of a literary work. It’s about space colonization, and it really hits how I feel about the way space exploration is currently managed. So it’s something that I want to write both because I think it’s a good story, and because it’s something I think needs to be said.

Hopefully, it’ll get read by someone at some point, too.

A Dad and a Writer, Part 3: Weeks 5 through 8

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Fatherhood is kicking my ass.

Okay, not really. In fact, things are getting incrementally better now, with the baby sleeping a few more minutes between feedings at night, and especially since my girlfriend and I are getting better and more efficient at all those baby-raising tasks.

In a way, that’s the difficulty I have to face: the excitement of having a new baby has worn off and now it’s the routine of childcare that’s beginning to be a bit of a drag.

It’s the apparent lack of progress that does it for me – usually, there’s a big jump in cognitive and physical abilities at around six weeks of age, but my son was born four weeks early so in our case we have about two more weeks of feed/sleep/feed/sleep/feed/wash/sleep to go through before the next baby level-up.

Let’s be clear: the problem here is me and my expectations, not the baby. It’s funny, because I have the same problem as a writer: I’m super motivated to get started on a writing milestone (whether it’s starting a new chapter, finishing one, or whatever) but I find it very hard to deal with the middle part, since there’s no clear goal or marker of success. I guess that in both cases, I just need to power through until I reach the next exciting bit.

On a more prosaic level, I’m still struggling to find time to work on the whole becoming-a-full-time-writer project. Whenever I can scrounge up an hour or so, I use it to either look for prospective agents, work on queries, or even to actually write a bit, but that amounts to maybe an hour a day during the week once I factor in work and household tasks (and I do need to let out some steam sometimes.) I’m really looking forward to getting a few more minutes back every day, because I do think they’ll make a major difference.

Speaking of which – I have a few more minutes available right now, so that could be an entire additionnal sentence for Book the Second. Quick, to the manuscript file!

Wordcount: 503

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Writing that second book has been difficult. The sequel to Book the First is something I can work on fairly easily, but it’s perhaps not the best use of my time since I have yet to find an agent willing to represent it. But working on something else presents its own challenges. I’ve started a couple of books, but both have stalled in part because of baby stuff and in part because I’m not that excited about them.

That said, I may have cleared that second hurdle. My latest idea works for me both at the big-picture, metaplot-and-theme level and at the character/action/voice level. In other words, it’s both fun to write and to plan.

So that’s where I am right now. A few hundreds words in yet another attempt – but at least it’s an attempt that will lead me somewhere I think I will like.

A Dad and a Writer, Part 2: Week 3 and 4

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Let me tell you, I have this fatherhood thing licked.

(Or maybe it’s the hubris talking…)

We’ve beaten the hydra of household and baby-prep chores down to a manageable level, we’ve plowed through our heavier-than-usual uncancellable social calendar, and we’ve established a new life routine.

I say “we”, but really the big game changer was that my girlfriend now feels well enough to handle some of the tasks. The pregnancy was quite hard (as were the first couple of weeks after the birth) and so I had to cover most of the housework for a while. But now that she’s back on her feet, I’ve found myself with an overabundance of free time.

(Now, that’s not hubris. It’s hyperbole.)

Kidding aside, at least now I can squeeze in some uninterrupted scrivening from time to time, and that has done wonder for my morale. I was really afraid I would have to put my writing career on hold for a year or two. But now, I know I can juggle both fatherhood and writing.

It’s not easy, but at least it’s possible.

And it’s also… surprisingly simple. It’s really a matter of realizing that every five-minute increment of the day counts. Before, five minutes was an entirely optional look at my emails, a glance at the news, or some sort of aimless wandering on the Web. Now – it’s washing some dishes, or starting a load of laundry, or taking out the trash.

It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up quickly – to the two or three hours a day I need to write. Speaking of which…