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Material

Before you think that this is all that I have accomplished today, a lot of the posts were from material that I had in a journal that I felt like sharing. Don't expect multiple blog posts every day, only when I am bored.

I feel like I am between projects today. I wanted to finish the short story last night and I will probably get back to reading it tonite. I want it to be perfect before I print it out and sent it off to a magazine. I hope someone will at least read it before it is summarily rejected.

How is that for confidence on one's work?

Sometimes I get email from readers of my books that I have met. I usually reply within a day or two. Sometimes I don't know what to say. I have always hated receiving a cookie cutter form letter type reply from someone so I really I try not to do that. I may not always have time to reply at length but when I reply it is sincere.

One of those emails asked me where do I get my ideas. It caused me to wonder for many days because for all the writing that I have done over the years, I have never attributed it to a single source. I don't know whether that is unique. I doubt that it is. There have always been a multitude of influences. I see irony in things that others overlook. Maybe that is why writers exist. We certainly do not write with any expectation of earning a living at it.

A lot of the things I have written since 2000 have been inspired by the same source, though. I refer to as my personal muse. She will laugh when she reads this.

There is a good bit of synchronicity about how the first series came to be. It is a long story and it will take many posts to cover it but hopefully those of you that want to know how a writer's mind works (or at times barely works) will find this interesting.

The year 2000 was significant for a couple of reasons. One, it was the year that I started missing my father forever. He passed away a few days before his 86th birthday. Two, it was the year that if I had not been revising From The Inside To The Closer I probably would have gone crazy with the pressure of of modern life and feeling like a total failure. I was working three part time jobs and had been working at least two of them since relocating from Connecticut in late 1999. Welcome to The Sunshine State. Somewhere in all that, amid the confusion, a friend from Connecticut directed me to a chat that he thought might interest me and take my mind off the things that were bothering me. It was around my birthday that I first visited the chat. I never even chatted.

The next day I returned and I actually made a passing comment in chat that was the source of a good deal of amusement for others. I made a couple of friends and for the next several weeks I could not wait to get home so I could reconnect with all the interesting people I had just met.

On my birthday I first met my personal muse. She really made the chat interesting. There were a lot of old time D&D people in the chat and suddenly they all became Wolves and pretended to be in a Wolf Pack. I sat back in utter amazement at the detail of the characters they had invented. What's more there was a very special character that was the defacto leader of the pack, The Wolfcat Ela'na.

I kind of wonder what would have happened with the series had I not been inspired to generate a thread about the Wolf Pack. Of course, I also wonder what would have happened had I not done something totally out of character for me. I never had chatted before.
A writer has to explore the nature and scope of the surrounding world.

Of course The Wolfcat was a character that my personal muse transformed into whenever there was a chat. I barely knew her at all but had already decided that I needed to somehow capture the magic of her character. I asked her permission to write a Wolf Story. She graciously consented, naming me the Scribe. Her idea of a story and my idea of a story were two different things.

Sometimes I think that everyone I knew at that time profession to be writing a book. So telling Ela'na that I was a writer was as easy for me as saying I also breathe somewhat regularly. I don't think she believed me. I don't think it mattered to either of us at that point. She responded as I might have expected. She thought it was great and then she let the subject drop. When I told her a little later on that I had started writing a story about the Pack she said, "Oh, I want to read it when you are done."

The gross difference in the scale of the word 'story' between what Ela'na expected and what I eventually sent to her six months later was considerable. She had been expecting a page or two, tops. I sent her over 400 pages in rough draft, attached to an email. A few days later she responded to the email, "Oh my God. You really are a writer. I could not believe how many pages the story is."

I don't know why I sent all of it to her. I didn't expect her to read it and she didn't diappoint me. First drafts are difficult enough for their creator to deal with.

Hmmm, I just had a random thought. What if our reality is someone's rough draft? It would explain a lot. Someone hand me the red pen so I can ink a few revisions on the fly.

Anyway although the nights of chatting with the brotherhood of the Pack are long past, I am still in contact with many of the Wolves and consider Ela'na my best friend. I have never met her but the way things go it might happen someday, at a book signing or somewhere else. I talk to her often enough. We know a good bit about each other but certainly not every detail and secret. A writer should never know everything about his personal muse. It could destroy the magic.

She still serves further inspiration. New characters and ideas for plots in the books that I have written, came in some way from her or something she said to me. One of the people that she introduced to me in 2002 is working on a book. I find his material is hysterically funny. I am editing it for him as he writes it.

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posted by Unknown @ 4:22 PM