Author: Scott William Carter

Conversations with Poe: Crossing Some Kind of Rubicon

Me: I had to put aside seventy thousand words of a manuscript  the other day.

Poe: Yikes!

Me: You’re Edgar Alan Poe, and the best you can do is ‘yikes’?

Poe: I have been attempting of late to modernize my speech a bit.

Me: That sounds more like you. Anyway, it wasn’t a bad thing. The project wasn’t working and I needed some distance from it. I’m already fifty pages into a new book and it’s going well. What’s interesting to me is how my attitude about this might have been totally different ten years ago, maybe even two years. I probably would have been very depressed. But now, I think, well, that’s just part of the process, and you get on with it. That’s when I realized something.

Poe: And what would that be?

Me: I crossed some kind of Rubicon. I stopped trying to become a writer and simply became one. Now, I’m not saying I didn’t think of myself as a writer before, but I no longer feel I have to prove to myself that I am. Or to anyone.  I’m the writer I want to be.

Poe: So you’ve achieved all of your goals and dreams?

Me: Oh no. I’m more driven than ever. But it’s different. I’ve relaxed, I guess. I’ve released myself form the outcome to some degree and just focused on the doing of it. Maybe it sells, maybe it doesn’t, but once I’ve done what I need to do, that’s out of my hands. Maybe it’s partly because I’m hitting one of those big birthdays in a couple months, too, but I suddenly realized that I was living the life I wanted to live. I’d spent so many years preparing to live it that it kind of snuck up on me, and when I finally took a hard look at the whole balance of my life, I realized that it was all right there. I just needed to relax into it. And when that happened, a lot of stuff I used to worry about didn’t matter any more.

Poe: Such as?

Me: A lot of things. Going to writing workshops or conferences, for one. If I want to go, I’ll go, but I’m a lot pickier about them now — which is saying something, because I was picky before. The labels other people apply to me. Who cares if I’m a full time writer or not? Really, does that label matter? Nope. It doesn’t matter to the reader, that’s for sure. Sales, rejections, awards, reviews  . . . I’m not saying these things don’t mean anything, because that would be lying, but I don’t sweat them as much now, for good or bad. It’s like I’m more driven than ever by putting one word in front of the other, of my own internal compass of what I should be doing as a writer. I trust that instinct now.

Poe: And you didn’t before?

Me: Not as much as I should have.

Poe: Sounds as if you’re saying — and I’m attempting to use a modern colloquialism here — that you just don’t give a shit what other people think.

Me. Wow. That’s definitely modernizing your speech.

Poe: Thank you. I’ve been reading your Elmore Leonard collection.

Me: Nice. Can’t go wrong studying dialog from that guy. But yeah, I think you’ve got the right spirit. I guess another way of saying it is that I know what kind of writer I want to be, and the life I want to live, and I’m no longer seeking anyone’s permission or approval to be it. I’m just living it.

New Story Published: “The Way the Rain Bends”

Just received the contributor copy in the mail of my story, “The Way the Rain Bends,” which was just published in The Los Angeles Review. It’s a provocative little short story I wrote while attending a workshop on the Oregon coast, set in Portland and told in second person, featuring the breakdown of a young marriage.  I read it the other day at a local reading and I still like it, very fun to read aloud, though it’s certainly dark and brooding.  Fitting for dark and brooding weather, I guess, which is what we’ve mostly been getting here lately.  I’ve been reading some of the other stories in the magazine, pieces by Natalie Goldberg and Ron Carlson, among others, really great stuff, and I encourage you to think about subscribing.

Just got word that Wooden Bones, my fantasy chronicling what happened to Pinocchio after he became a real boy, will be published in paperback next summer, which is welcome news.   My young adult novel, President Jock, Vice President Geek, was just released in audio, available for digital download from Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Plus my second mystery under my Jack Nolte pen name, A Desperate Place for Dying, featuring the curmudgeonly Garrison Gage, was also published in audio.

As for me, I carry on like usual, writing my four or five pages a day, reading good books, helping the kids with homework and piano, raking far too many leaves, and eagerly awaiting for each installment of The Walking Dead. I’ve also been extracting myself more and more from the Internet.  Went a little overboard during the election, which is usual for me, but I came out of it really questioning how engaged I want to be in general when it comes to the Internet.  I’ve already come to the conclusion that I want to be a minimalist promoting my work (believing, as I do, that the best way to increase your “discoverablity” as a writer, which is the latest buzzword in publishing, is to focus your energy on just writing more rather than trying to hype what you’ve already written, because more work means more gateways for people to find out about you as well as more for them to buy when they do — win, win), but I’ve also been feeling like I want to be a minimalst when it comes to how much time I spend reading online, too.

I already cut out all social media (Facebook, Twitter, and the like), and now I’ve been dramatically curtailing how much time I spend on listservs, blogs, and other things.  It’s a fine balancing act, because I like being informed, about publishing and the world at large, but I really, really like how I feel when I’m mostly disconnected from The Great and Powerful Digital Hive Mind.  The peace of mind is amazing.

This isn’t to say I want to give up the Internet completely.  It’s still the greatest tool for communication since the Gutenberg printing press.  But it is to say that I’m finding how to use it only when I need it (which isn’t nearly as often as I used to think) and not using it because I have this paranoid fear that Something Out There Is Happening And I Don’t Know About It.

Postcards from the Garage: Guardian of the Brag Shelf

I have a new friend in the house.  I picked up this handsome little puppet of Pinocchio in Venice during our summer trip to the Mediterranean.  He now sits on my “brag shelf,” standing guard over all the books and magazines where my work has appeared.   It was a pretty big memento to stuff into my suitcase, but I couldn’t pass it up, seeing how my book, Wooden Bones, was coming out at almost the same time I was visiting Italy.  You see Pinocchio puppets all over Italy, of course, but most of them have the traditional red outfit, and this one better matched the spirit of my book.  The company who produced it is based in Italy, and there was only one store in all of Venice where they were sold.