New Beginnings

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Matt

Goal Thinking

I’ve been doing a lot of goal work lately. Everywhere I turn I’m running into goals. At work we’re meeting about next year planning, at my desk we’re doing year-end personnel reviews, I’m reviewing my writing goals for this last quarter, and I’m setting them for next year.

I’m also proud to have just blogged for the first time on the Casablanca authors blog, and oddly enough, my first date to post is January 1st and the theme is “New Beginnings!” So, I wrote there about my high-level goals. Casablanca is the romance imprint of Sourcebooks who is launching my military romantic suspense series “The Night Stalkers” in February, check out the cover over to the right on my site.

So with “goals” being all up in my face at the moment, I thought I’d wander through what mine are at the moment. First let me say that goals and I have a love/hate relationship. I love! them: they drive me, they motivate me to achieve, and I often do achieve. I’m really, really good at goals. I’ve gone out of my way to study. Goals have let me design and build a house in six months, ride a bicycle around the world, and become a multi-published author.

I hate! them: I set impossibly high goals, kill myself trying to hit them, and then berate myself if I miss by half an inch. Last quarter is a great example:

October 1 I gave myself 3 months to:

  • Do a second draft of my 3rd Night Stalkers book, including adding about 15k words and drastically altering the last 1/3 of the book
  • Redesign the covers and marketing for 4 books and republish them on Smashwords, Kindle, B&N and POD on CreateSpace)
  • Do a heavy redraft of a book and write the first chapter of the next 3 books in the series just to make sure it would work the way I thought it should before publishing that one as well
  • Completely redraft my first novel, which I love but suffers severely from beginning writer aches and pains

I missed the last goal by about half. It’ll be done in… well, that’s next year’s story. So, when I write it down, it looks awesome. What do I do? Berate myself for missing the finish on the last book. I never said I wasn’t nuts! Avoid that trap if you can, I’ve been conciously setting goals for roughly 25 years and I still fall into it every time. … And real reason that I missed that deadline by so much? I wrote about 20k words and then threw them out as being down the wrong path for the redraft.

To prepare for the new year, I first set my high-level goals. If my detailed goals don’t feed into my high-level goals, they’re a waste of time. So, what did I cook up for myself this time? Are they mad! crazed! foolish! goals? Absolutely! I can’t wait.

  • Finish the from scratch redraft of my first book and publish
  • Polish and publish 2nd book in series written a decade later
  • Write book 4 for The Night Stalkers series -contract deadline June 30 (they’re Special Forces helicopter pilots, not vampires, just in case you were wondering)
  • Then write at least 2 more books before year’s end, preferably 3

Why so aggressive? For me it isn’t a matter of an aggressive goal, I’ve set goals to do more of what I love doing. These all feed into my goal of making my career as a writer and a passion for having the amount of fun I get from writing. A dual purpose goal.

I’ve also set some big goals at work and in my personal life as well.

  • More dates with my wife
  • Lose 15 pounds
  • Walk a half-marathon by April and a full one by end of summer

Note how neatly those 3 fit together. An exercise walk together to a good movie, a beautiful garden, a new place to explore… I like that. The good news is, so does she. I love how a good set of goals all work together.

Anyway, this isn’t to brag or to be lame. This is to jam a stick in the sand and say, “I will attempt this, starting here.” (see my CasaBlog mentioned above for more on that). I even created a new blog category for myself (see the pretty “G” up above) and I’ll post on it and see how my goals and my mood are doing as I go.

Rock on!

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Looking at story

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Matt

Sunday Story

I set out on a quest a bit over a year ago to discover and learn story from everything around me. I’ve tried to poke under the cover of great authors writing. I’ve watched people while I was interviewing for jobs and while commuting to them. And even though my quest went below the blog radar (something about a new job in a new city and a crazy set of writing quarterly goals), it hasn’t stopped.

So here I sit at the change over of the year and wonder what I’ve really learned about story and how can I apply it to my writing. How do I assess my own writing? I can’t. So, what else can I shine the mirrored shield of my quest for story upon.

Myself? Oh! There’s an idea.

A year ago I was unemployed, excited by the idea of approaching a character as a holistic being rather than as some character list of attributes. An idea I was given by a wonderful career consultant that worked incredibly well, I had a job in under 3 weeks using her ideas and suggestions after 13 months on the street.

I blogged about my struggle to integrate those skills into my writing. Of seeing the character as a whole. I just finished book 3 of my “Night Stalker” series. Those characters grew and changed, fought and struggled to come to life. The heroine for book 4 stepped on screen completely intact. I can hear her speak (funny, sassy, a little wild), see her move (with the smooth ease and grace of a trio of teenage girls I watched on the train, completely at ease with themselves, at least on the outside), and I can see her pain (risen from too many stories told by too many women).

I seem to have learned that a character doesn’t travel through a story. Nor are they driven by a story. They are a story.

I think that is my goal for the 4-1/2 books I have laid out ahead of me this year. I’m going to write the story that comes uniquely to each of us, that makes us who we are. Which is when people are most fun. When we get to know their stories.

I just caught up via e-mail with a friend after a year or more gap. He’s a good friend, close, important. But he moved far away and we each got busy. But I know his story and he knows mine, at least some good-sized chunks of it. And that is what has made us interesting to each other. And made it so easy to pick up the thread not so very far from where we left off.

We are story. That’s why we’re engaging to each other. And when a character is story, well, that’s where the truly memorable characters come in. Anyone read any Jane Austen lately? I’ve been diving through her books, 2-1/2 down, 3-1/2 to go and I’m loving it. These women are alive with story, it drips off their very fingertips. And a few of the men as well.

Hmmm… sounds like a good topic for next time.

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Revisiting all the good bits

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Matt

Writerly Wanderings

My never-ending quest for some degree of common sense in my thoughts continues. I’m presently “putting the polish” on my third book in a series prior to sending the manuscript off to the publisher. “The Night Stalkers” series is military romantic suspense. Special Forces helicopters, the first women to fly them, and the men they deserve. It is so much fun writing about these women and the love of their lives that I can’t begin to describe it, so I won’t try.

But I keep finding myself thinking about my books that are already complete. Partly because it’s a series. My first book is in the publisher’s hands, actually, it may be in the printer’s hands by now, heading for a February release. And the book 1 heroine is a recurring character so I’m right now dealing with her as edits to book 2 and finishing draft of book 3.

I’m not revisiting them as in, “Oh, I’m a better writer now, I could have done that book so much better.” First, I think that’s a fallacy. I was deeply involved with those characters and that story and I brought them to life with all the passion and skill I had at the time. If I were to go back and re-edit, I’d probably knock the life out of those characters. Second, that’s a trap I learned to avoid long ago. Do I want to rewrite one book for the rest of my life? Or, do I want to forge a new relationship with new characters and a new story? That certainly keeps me moving ahead. See my immediately prior blog on thinking vs. rethinking.

No, it’s thinking about them the same way I think about any book I love. If I love a book, it becomes a part of me and I wander back over it in my mind, sometimes days later, sometimes years. What I’m doing is building mental pathways.

There’s an old Star Trek scene where this emotionless android named Data is trying to describe how it is possible he likes someone. He says that his brain is designed to support commonly used pathways, and thinking about her had evolved his mind to the point where all of the pathways to do with her flowed more smoothly, because they’d grown used to being used.

I love to do that with good writing, my own first book heroine (I get a bit of a crush on all my heroines, though my wife promises that she isn’t jealous), or another. I love running over the good bits. I will sometimes pick up a book just to reread a favorite passage, Laura Kinsale’s hero who falls off his horse, Susan Wiggs plain heroine who is suddenly seen as beautiful because she has left society and joined a pirate ship, and a hundred others.

And that’s where the bonus is. By revisiting all the good bits, the pathways in my brain become more and more familiar with the good bits and how they work. It’s not a conscious process, it can’t be. Because when I’m sitting down to write my next story, when I’m lost in telling that story, that’s when my subconscious says, “make her afraid to fly.” Ha! I actually hadn’t thought of that until after I’d written that sentence. “A military helicopter pilot who is afraid to fly…” I think I just got a cool idea for my book 4 heroine. See how it works? Go revisit all the good bits.

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Rethinking vs. Thinking

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Matt

Writerly Wanderings

It’s Sunday, this graphic is a “W” like in Wednesday, but it is a Writerly Wandering, so live it. :)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot lately, which, as my wife will tell you, is a very dangerous thing. One time, “I’ve been thinking” ended with me designing and building a house. This isn’t quit so grandiose, but it does have some interesting implications for my writing.

COVERS
I just received my first cover for my upcoming military romantic suspense series, “The Night is Mine.” I’ll post it shortly on my blog page. Whatever can and might be said about such a cover, it does one thing immensely well, it jumps at you. It is also beautifully and will deliver what it promises and represents a type of book I never imagined writing, but had an absolute blast doing. None of these, however are the point of my thoughts at this moment.

What I’m thinking is the powerful impact it has.This cover is a stand up and punch you in the nose at it grabs for your attention. That’s what you want a cover to do.

Then I look at my existing covers, which you can see on my blog page if you’re quick. (I’ll explain that in a moment.) I love these covers. I put a lot of work into them. They’re interesting, nuanced, subtle, are illustrative of key moments in my tale, are… They do not stand up and punch you in the nose saying, “I’m interesting. I’m a book you want to read.”

So, I’ve been rethinking my covers. That’s why you’ll have to be quick to see what I’m talking about. In the next week or so, I’ll be putting up new covers.

The danger here is the rabbit hole of time. Rethinking is not something you want to do often. To do so requires time and effort. “Rethinking” is time and effort that is being spent on something that is now in my past. Rather than “Thinking” which is time and effort spent in the present for the future.

Rethinking is like rewriting. Which will create more benefit for my future goal to make my living as a writer? Tinkering with an already completed novel or writing a new one. Rewriting vs. writing. Rethinking vs. thinking.

There are times to look back. I’ve learned a great deal about marketing over these last weeks, just from seeing my “The Night is Mine” cover and getting it in front of people and witnessing their near universal interest. It has impact. It is a statement. It’s what a cover should be and should do.

I have decided that it is worth a time investment of a weekend to update these first 4 covers. Not more than that. Hopefully less. Why so little? Well, I’ve got another book to write. Thinking toward the future rather than rethinking the past.

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