Author: Scott William Carter

I finished a book today. There’s still clean up to do, some detail checking, that sort of thing, but the hard work is done. I crossed a 90,000 word desert and found water at the end. Now I’m going to reward myself by going to a very cool bookstore and buying some very cool books.

How many books is that? Five? Six? I’m starting to lose count. I suppose that’s a good thing.

Out here on the Oregon coast, it’s been a good week. I came out for two writing workshops on adjacent weekends and stayed to finish this mystery. Just under 30,000 words cranked out in that time, which is a fairly good pace. Honestly, I could have done more, but part of the reason I’m here is to socialize and connect with other serious writers — and finding serious writers, people really dedicated to the craft, is not always easy. I can roll down my window driving through town and probably get at least a dozen people to shout yes if I ask if they’re writers, but a serious writer? Someone who believes that really pounding keys, putting in the practice time, doing and not just talking, studying books and not just reading them — well, that’s a little harder to find.

And it shows in their accomplishments: Of the two dozen writers out here, probably a third have sold books and most the rest have at least published some short stories in professional venues. And the ones just starting down the path? You can tell that they’re going places, too, just by their dedication. An amazing group.

What did I learn during this writing week? I’ve written 70,000 words in seven days before, so I’ve done more words, but it showed me that even when there’s lots of distractions and I feel like I’m not very efficient with my time, if I stay at it, if I keep plugging away, the words do add up. A thousand here, a thousand there, and suddenly you have a novel.  I also learned that I love being productive. Or, I should say, I relearned it. I don’t know if I need to be 6000 words a day productive, but half that would be good. Productivity can overwhelm almost all roadblocks, whether they’re emotional ones inside your head (the ones that shout, “This is crap!”) or whether they’re the ones related to publishing (slow editors, the bad economy, etc.).  In the end, they all vanish under a tidal wave of words.

I think that because I knew I had until Friday to finish the book, well, I took until Friday to finish the book. I also realized that I have no idea what my writing process is. It seems to change from book to book, and the more I think I know what my process is, the more I realize later that it’s just me making up a story about how I write. Funny that. Anyway, I just write. However you approach a book, whether you start with a title and a funny first line and go with your gut, or whether you create detailed outlines and complex charts to guide your way, it’s all writing. If you think about it, all that matters to the reader is the book sitting in front of them. It really doesn’t matter how you got it in their hands. Each writer has to find the path through that desert that works for them. Here’s the key: If it’s not working, try something else. Not doing that one thing stops a lot of writers. In fact, it’s probably the number one reason writers fail. They don’t try a new approach, a new method, a new technique, a new way.

What now? Well, there’s another workshop Fri-Sun, this one focused on understanding the complex world of book contracts. Of course, the real reward is I get to start another book. I know just which one too. It’s actually already started, a YA I’m very excited about. (Have I mentioned that my first book is now available for preorder?)  After that, I’ll go where the muse takes me. Unless a publishing contract takes me somewhere else, of course. I may have a muse that likes to play in a pretty big sand box, but he will listen to reason when there’s money involved. Thank god for that. I may be writing simply because I love the craft, but a check once in a while is nice too.   A check with commas in it is even nicer.

It’s early in the summer, but it’s been busy so far.  We’re still settling into our remodeled house, as well as trying to get the last pesky details worked out for our refinance, but it should work out all right.  Just really hard to find a neighborhood like this one to raise our family in, so I’m glad we committed to staying here indefinitely.  We just got back from a fun camping trip at Fort Stevens, way out on the northern most tip of Oregon.  It was our first time there and we’ll definitely be going back.  We walked the tunnels of the fort that suffered the only continental attack on the United States in World War II, climbed the Astoria Column, visited a fantastic maritime museum, and even saw the house in the movie Goonies.  What could be better than that? 

Other than that, I’m teaching the little girl to ride a bike, working with the little boy on his alphabet, and enjoying riding the motorcycle to work along the great back roads between the house and the day job. 

Put a few more stories online, both for the Kindle and for online reading via my own website.  Check them out in my bookstore.  People have been buying, and that’s certainly encouraging.  My first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is now available for preorder from Amazon, though there’s no cover yet. 

Work still progresses on the novel, a mystery, and should have a draft in hand by the end of the month. Too close to this one right now to see if it’s working the way it should, but one thing’s for certain, I have all the ingredients of a good mystery and what might turn into a great series.  That’s a great feeling, when you can see how a book is supposed to work.  Whether it does or not, well, that might just be writing another draft.  Or a dozen. 

However, in the end it really is about the writing itself.  It’s great to publish, and to share my stories with readers, but ultimately I write because of the thrill of creation and because it’s something I can never fully master.   If you expend too much energy worrying about things you can’t control, it can start to sap away the joy that brought you to the craft in the first place.  For me, writing is and always will be a solitary endeavor.  It’s about carving out that chunk of time where I get to play god in the universe inside my head.  I bring too much baggage with me inside, it really just gets in the way.  

Which brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about.  It’s easier than ever to be connected than it was before — both to people and to information.  We’ve got 24 hours news, Google, text messaging, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, email, the list goes on.  And while all of these things have value, I’m astonished at the sheer amount of static out there.  The noise to signal ratio has gotten awfully high.  Of course, this is totally subjective, and I understand that; one person’s static is another’s life work.  

But sometimes it feels a little too much like the Borg connecting to the hive mind.  When we went camping, I made a decision to stay off the Internet and avoid the news in any form, both in print and on the radio.  It was really refreshing, and while it did feel a little disconcerting to come back and not know what was going on (Michael Jackson died?  You’re kidding!), it showed me that while I love the power of the Internet to inform and connect, it’s vitally important that I compartmentalize it better than I have been.  Because my day job has me online a lot (a big chunk of my job is administering and supporting the online classes for a university), the tempation to immerse myself in that sea of information is always there, but the lessons I’ve learned lately is that there is value is staying disconnected just as there is in staying connected. 

Not sure I’m adequately explaining this.  Not sure I can.  But the upshot is, the ratio between being connected and disconnected to that hive mind had gotten out of whack for me.  Silence — both real and metaphorical — can be wonderful for nourishing the soul and the creative mind.  I’ve been finding a better balance lately.

I spent some time the last few days setting up an online bookstore and putting a few stories online.  Though I love writing short stories, I admit they can be hard to find.  Often you have to buy an anthology full of stories you may not want to read, or subscribe to a magazine that may not really be your cup of tea.  And while I fully recommend buying anthologies and subscribing to magazines, I finally decided that I needed to be a little more proactive making my fiction available.

I was spurred to do this by a very helpful post by Michael Stackpole on a writer’s listserv I’m on laying out the steps for putting work up on Amazon for the Kindle.  Since I decided to take the plunge on that, I did a little extra work and made the stories available online through my own website as well, using PayPal, for a very low fee — usually $1.99.  I’m not sure if this is the best route, so I may tinker with the delivery, but I’m committed to putting at least two or three stories up a week until I get most of my work online.  For the most part, these will be stories I’ve already sold, though I am usually contractually bound to wait six months to a year after a story appears before making it available elsewhere.  Plus it would be bad form anyway to upstage the places that have bought my work. 

This is going to be part of a larger effort to start being more active in selling my work.  Like most writers, flogging my wares is not the first thing I’d like to do with my time, but with the way publishing is changing, the lines between writer, publisher, and bookstore are getting more blurred every day, and technological advances are making it more feasible for writers to reach their audience with fewer middlemen in between.  Plus the stigma of self-publishing — a real problem for me, I admit, because I really do like the stamp of approval from editors — is beginning to fade.  It won’t replace the NY presses, but it is another viable route to go. 

So while I’m still going to be pursuing the traditional publishing route (after all, the best publishers are better at getting my work in front of readers, which is what they’re paid to do), you’ll probably see me using my website, print on demand, and other tools to augment what I’m doing with traditional publishers.  Of course, the trick is to do this in a way that doesn’t suck up a lot of time that should go to writing.  We’ll see how it goes.  One thing’s for certain:  There’s never been a better time to be a writer.  Not all writers may agree with this, but if you want to write, and reach an audience, there’s more ways to do it now than every before. 

Of course, you also have to write well.  That’ll never change, no matter how much publishing does.