Category: About Kelly

Patience is a Virtue…Arghh!

A comment by CJD in one of my Wyrdsmiths posts back in 2007 included this: “the struggle is with embracing that kind of strange patience (embracing uncertainty and ‘no applause,’ as the Buddhists say).” It got me thinking about writing and patience and the fact that it’s one place I am quite Zen.

One of the first things I learned back when I started down the writing road was how to be genuinely patient about things I had no control over and the corollary skill of figuring out which things I do and don’t have control over. It’s an important skill for a writer to try to develop.

I don’t have control over how fast editors will respond to my stories. I do have control over how many stories I have in the mail, and who gets what when. I don’t have control over whether or not a given market will buy a book of mine. I do have control over how good the book is.

At one point this led my father-in-law to comment on my being a type z* personality. The specific incident that made him say that had to do with a waitress having forgotten to get my order in with the cook so that my food failed to come at the same time as everyone else’s. My response was just to smile and tell her to get it to me when she could. I don’t have control over when my food comes. I do have control over whether or not to let it raise my blood pressure.

I get a lot of questions from friends and family about when will I see covers, copyedits, royalties, etc. I can usually answer these questions with educated guesses based on contract language, past experience, etc. and if asked I will dredge up the information, but I don’t think about it much otherwise. I’m not sure, but I think this drives some of them crazy—that I have to work to give them such important information and that it doesn’t seem to interest me.

But those are all whens that I can’t control, so there’s very little point in worrying about them or even thinking about them. Things I can control are how I react to the cover when it comes, when I turn in my copyedits relative to my deadline, and what I’ll do with any royalties.

This is not to say that I don’t get impatient, just that I try very hard not to. In my case that means learning not to think about the things I can’t control, and to focus intensely on the ones that I can. It’s something midway between denial and low grade meditation. I’m sure there are other ways of handling the issue of writer’s patience, but that’s what works for me.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 25 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

*subsequent events have caused my father-in-law to rethink that one, as it’s not that I’m type z it’s just that the hyperfocused version of me mostly comes out when I’m sitting at my laptop with no witnesses.

R E S P E C T and R E L I E F

2013 update:  One of the fundamental social problems for the beginning writer in America is the resistance of friends, family, and even total strangers to the idea that writing is a legitimate pursuit.  At least, until you’re making money at it. My experiences abroad have been very different, but here in the USA there is a major cultural bias against work that doesn’t bring in a paycheck. Without that monetary stamp of approval, strangers will say things like “no, I meant what do you do for a living.” Family will ignore your boundaries and ask you to do all sorts of things during your writing time because you’re not really working. Even friends will often fret about your chances and worry that you’re wasting time you’ll never get back. It is because of this that eight years on my primary feeling about getting my first novel published is still relief despite the unusual levels of support that I personally experienced on my road to publication. Now, on to the reblogging. 

As part of a longer post over at her personal blog my friend and fellow author Lyda Morehouse wrote: Writers, in particular those who haven’t got book or short story credits to their name yet, have a hard time convincing their friends and family that what they do is real and important. Getting a paycheck is something you can wave in people’s faces to say, “Yes, actually, I got paid to write, thank you very much.”

This brought me back to trying to explain to people how I felt when I sold WebMage (the novel-when I sold the short story I was unambiguously delighted). Now, let me first note how fortunate I am in my friends, family, and writing community. Pretty much from the get go, I’ve had incredible support from people who really believed in me and what I wanted to do. In particular, my wife, Laura, has never wavered in the slightest in her belief in my writing, not even at those times I myself was wavering.

When I sold the novel I had quite a few friends who were not upset exactly, but certainly concerned about my apparent lack of wild excitement. Part of this was because I was going through a particularly difficult family trauma and there was fear on the part of my friends that the strain of that was devouring my joy. There may even be some truth to that hypothesis. But it wasn’t the whole or even the majority truth, because I was intensely engaged in the experience of having sold a book. It’s just that what I was feeling was mainly relief.

Relief from my own occasional conviction that I was never going to make it.

Relief that I would never again have to say “yes, I’m a writer of novels but…”

Relief that I had not let down all the people who had supported me on my way here.

Relief that the long trial of apprenticeship was over.

I have had a hard time explaining this to most people, though there are two major categorical exceptions: 1) Other writers-who have been there. 2) Ph.D.s-who have also been there. With the latter, all I had to say was “Do you remember how you felt when you passed your defense? Like that.” And the response was a knowing nod or a wry smile.

Selling the book or passing the defense means you have passed through the fire. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a career or be a success. It just means that you have survived the ordeal of getting to the place where those things are now genuinely possible. That may sound pessimistic, but it’s not. It’s the voice of relief, and it’s everything.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 19 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Sci Fi

So, I stumbled on this iteration of the sci-fi/skiify/SF/Science Fiction discussion, via Frank Wu who links to Lucy Snyder.

This one fascinates me. I personally use sci-fi, SF, science fiction, and speculative fiction pretty interchangeably, and I’ve never understood the conniptions some folks have about the term sci-fi. This is despite the facts that I’m a third generation fan, that I’ve been going to conventions for 25 years, and that I write and publish in the field.

I really don’t get it. Yes, some people use the term to denigrate the field. However, for those who think science fiction is a waste of time, it’s not about terminology it’s about content. They’re going to dump on science fiction no matter what you call it. In my experience they also use the term science fiction to denigrate the field. If you talk to them about SF, they assume you mean San Francisco until you explain it to them, then they dump on SF. Likewise speculative fiction.

This whole debate seems to me to be a sterling way to let the people who hate the field define the way you should talk about it, and to turn the term sci-fi into something that people who are on the pro science fiction side of the fence use to bash each other over the head with. In short: getting worked up over sci-fi seems terribly counterproductive.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 13 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

2013 Update: Adding in my comments from the original post in response to Lyda noting that Sci-Fi registers as a media fandom thing for her or a non-reader thing.

I don’t get the non-readers thing. I’ve used the term sci-fi all my life and I am not a media person and never have been. I don’t watch television at all and haven’t in more than a decade and I rarely watch movies. I come from a family culture of reading first and media as a distant and barely visible second. I picked up “sci-fi” exclusively from literary sources.

Actually, thinking about it, it rings as an academic/literary term for me, c-sci, poli-sci, sci-fi.

Story and Sleep

I’m an insomniac. Let’s start with that. Sleeping is a skill I’ve never fully mastered and I am subject to both going to sleep too late and waking up too early, as well as occasional bouts of being awake in the middle. In general this is no fun, and actually in specific as well, now that I think about it.

But what does this have to do with writing you might ask. And it’s a reasonable question. I’m not entirely sure it has anything to do with writing, but it definitely has to do with being a writer, or more specifically a storyteller. Not only do I tell stories literarily (my writing) and socially (at parties) but I tell stories to myself in a more or less continual stream.

Someone smiles at me as they drive past me on the freeway? I automatically make up all sorts of things to explain the smile. I can’t help myself, given any starting point and something unknown, my brain starts filling in the gaps. This is one of the two chief sources of insomnia for me–the other being problem solving–I can’t get my brain to shut up and quit telling stories. I seem to need the damn things.

As with most storytellers, I am an avid consumer of storytelling (that might even be the root of being a storyteller–an impulse that says “well, if nobody else is going to tell me a story…). Often this leads to reading–yes, the horror, a writer who reads–quite often at night, when I might otherwise be sleeping. Because of this and the complete exhaustion of some life stress I made a discovery about three years ago.

I sleep better if I don’t finish reading the book. In fact, I can almost always go straight to sleep if I put it down at a cliffhanger moment. If, however, I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open but I still push on to the finish to see how it all ends, I will then spend the next several hours wide awake.

This is because (I think) when there’s still story left at the time I put the book down, my brain stays in happy reader mode–the story is still in the hands of the author and therefore it is not my problem. OTOH, if I finish the book, the storytelling part of my brain knows that the author is done and realizes that if it doesn’t do something right now the story will end! There will be no more story! Aiee!

And so my brain kicks into high gear telling a new story. It may be the story of what happens in the book after it ends, or it may be the story of what’s going to happen to the stupid cat who is sitting on my head. That part’s not really important. The important part is that story is once more my responsibility. I bring this up because last night, like an idiot, I finished the book.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 26 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

(Spidey) Sense of Structure

Writing can get easier. I won’t say that it does, because every writer has a different journey, but it can.

The good news, I’ve recently developed a strong sense of novel structure. The bad news, it’s still almost entirely intuitive rather than conscious. The worse news, it took 10 books. The better news, it seems to be shifting into a conscious process as I’m writing number 11.

I’ve had a pretty good handle on how to plot since my fourth book—the first three are decently-plotted, but it was a messy organic process. But I didn’t fully develop this structural sense until writing number 10, The Black School, + 30 or more outlines. I got inklings of it with number 8, Chalice, but it mostly blinked out for 9, Cybermancy. And now I’m occasionally managing to consciously invoke it for 11, MythOS.

This is a pretty typical development process for me in terms of learning how to do something in writing:

1. Consciously set out to learn how to do X
2. Beat my head against the wall on X
3. Lose track of the fact that I’m trying to learn X
4. Get compliments about how well I’m handling X
5. Notice that X makes sense to me intuitively—it tastes right*
6. Think about how I’m doing X
7. Bafflement
8. Forget that I’m thinking about how I’m doing X
9. Answer someone’s question about X and realize I now get it
2013 Updated to add:
10. Forget that I ever didn’t know how to do X
11. Forget how to explain X
12. Grrrrr

*Tastes right. I’ll talk about this in some depth with my next post.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 15 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project. In and effort to elicit comment at the old site, I wrote the bit that follows at the end. No response. This is one of the many reasons I have not enabled comments here at kellymccullough.com)

Thoughts? Arguments? Digressions? Large purple groundhogs?

Charlotte Appearance Thursday April 13 10am-12pm

Hello Charlotte NC area folks. I’ll be out your way on Thursday morning.

I’ll be at the Rowan-Cabarrus Community College Literary and Fine Arts Festival 2013. The festival is open to the community at large, as well as to Rowan-Cabarrus students and all events are free so come on by.

Science Fiction Author, Kelly McCullough April 11, 2013 double session 10:00 a.m.-10:40 a.m. and
11:00 a.m.-12:05 p.m North Carolina Research Campus, Rm. 115

 

 

Deciding Not To Quit

We had an interesting discussion at Wyrdsmiths the other night about not quitting writing. It was stimulated in part by a note in the acknowledgments of Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour “to Dan Hooker for calling the day after I almost decided to quit.” It was something that resonated for me when I read it—I always read acknowledgments—so I brought it up at the meeting.

It was a moment all of us who were there had experienced at least once, and I suspect that almost any writer you talk to, no matter how well published, will be able to tell you about that moment. Maybe five times I’ve felt frustrated and depressed enough about the whole writing gig to seriously contemplate finding something else to do, but I’ve had only one true deciding not to quit moment.

It came in January 2005 right after a Wyrdsmiths meeting. At that point I had a good agent who believed in my work, more than 20 short stories either in print or forthcoming, 2 novels in the trunk and 5 out with various editors none of which had sold. I was also having major family stress and had seen a three book hard/soft deal that was over three years in the making fall apart at the last possible moment. That had happened a couple of months earlier and several editors had passed on the books involved since.

I was depressed, not clinically, but damn close, and I felt like 15 years of hard work had officially gone to hell. But worse, far far worse, I wasn’t enjoying writing. I was doing it—I can’t not—but I wasn’t taking the joy from it that I always had. For perspective, I’ve worked at art or entertainment my entire conscious life. I pursued theater in serious way from ages 11-22. When I was 23 I switched to writing and found the second great love of my life (my wife Laura is the first) and I never looked back. Not until January 2005.

So came, the meeting that sent me over the edge. The trigger doesn’t matter. It wasn’t about that, it was about me and writing. I drove home (an hour) getting more and more down the whole way. When I got in I went off to stare at the ceiling. For probably three hours I did nothing but think about how something I had loved and pursued for years had come to this and how I just wasn’t feeling the joy of it anymore. And I tried to figure out what else I could possibly do with my time—I was writing full time. And the answer was nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t anything else that appealed to me half so much.

I don’t know what I’d have done if something else had occurred to me. And the fact that nothing did was totally bleak at the time, because I felt like the only thing I wanted to do was going nowhere and would continue to go nowhere. But in retrospect it was a powerful moment. I had come to place where I realized that writing wasn’t just something I did that I could walk away from. It was who I was down in the bedrock, and I would keep at it no matter what.

The next day I got up and wrote, though I didn’t much enjoy it. And the next day. And the day after that. And somewhere in there I started to love the work again, and then WebMage sold and Cybermancy. In the last year and a half I’ve written three novels that I am damn proud of, one of which is hands down the best work I’ve ever done. And now, two years on, I’m finally loving writing with the same joy and deep passion that I found when I first started. 2014 edit: adding that seven years and eleven novels have passed since I wrote this and I’m more in love with writing than ever.

Deciding not to quit was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and one of the hardest. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 22 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Coming from Theater (improv)

This is going to be another Kelly is a strange monkey post. As in, “I’m not like the other monkeys,” or at least many of them. I didn’t come to writing from English, or Creative Writing, or even Script Writing. I came from theatrical performance with a heavy emphasis on improv. I worked Ren Fests for a decade and rode the circuit for a year or two. There seem to be a couple of places where this background either informs or drives my take on writing in a very different direction from what I see in many other writers’ process posts.

First, rejection and bad reviews. I don’t much like them, but they don’t hit me nearly as much hard as they get to many other writers. I think that’s because I’ve bombed on stage and failed pretty spectacularly at auditions. I’ve been rejected personally. Me. Not my written work filtered and refined and sent out, but me, in the flesh and immediately. In improv you can’t even blame bad material, because its yours and you’re making it up on the spot.

Second, I don’t have a preconceived idea of what the perfect finished product will look like. There is no platonic ideal of the story in my head that I have no hope of living up to. When I start a story, even one of novel length, I’m essentially doing guided improv. I know my situation and my punctuation points (things that have to happen for the story to work). I even have a pretty detailed outline. But I don’t know exactly how I’m going to get from scene A. to scene B. and I don’t know how I’m going to play them, poignant, bitter, darkly funny. That’s all business figured out on the fly and enormously fun to write.

My end product is usually much better than my initial idea because that idea was never anything more than a carefully crafted skeleton to hang all the bits on. And, if you just go by the skeleton you can to tell what the species is, but its hard to say whether you’re going to get my great aunt Hattie or Michelle Pfeifer. Also, because its improv, if I started over again from square one, I know that I might end up with Ethyl Merman instead.

Anyway, there’s nothing superior or inferior about my process. It’s just different enough that I thought it might be worth noting. There are a million ways to tell a story, all of them equally right or, I suppose, equally wrong.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog January 24 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Inspirations/Influences

Tolkien and Shakespeare are the foundations on which all my later reading and writing are built. I was raised by an English major who began to read both to me before I could speak. She read me children’s books as well, but my strongest early memories of story come from the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard III, The Tempest, Lear, MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. The rhythms and poetry and magic in those stories are so deep in my soul I can’t separate inspiration from self.
Andre Norton was the first author whose work I pursued on my own, and I can hear her sometimes as I write a sentence. She was followed by Anne McCaffrey whose influence I’m sure is there even if I can’t pick it out. Then came H. Beam Piper who is still one of my very favorite authors for his ability to layer deep and intricate historical context into stories that read like space opera. As a reader I dabbled with Niven and Pournelle, flirted with Kurtz, and fell hard for Zelazney. His self-aware sarcasm and understanding that family makes for the bitterest enemies is plain to see in WebMage and its sequel Cybermancy.

After I started writing came Terry Pratchett—an international treasure whose synthesis of humor and hard truths I try to touch on in my own lighter work—and Tim Powers—who I can’t praise highly enough—is a looming shadow in my dark stories.

I’m sure I’m missing others, but those are the strongest influences, the ones I’m sure have colored everything I write. This post has also reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to do here, post my list of perfect books, and my definition of what that means. Perhaps tomorrow. In the meantime, think about what you consider a perfect book and what might go on your list.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog December 3rd 2006. Reposted as part of the reblogging project, and edited for clarity)

 

Fun With Dismorphia

This is another one of those things that men aren’t supposed to talk about, like crying. Which is exactly why I’m feeling the need to talk about it now. Before I get started, let me note that I’m not asking for sympathy here, I’m sharing this entirely in the hope that it will make a few other people with the same issues feel less alone.

I suffer from low level dismorphia. It’s not severe and it’s not debilitating, but it’s very real and it has significant impacts on my life and self image. Without making a fairly large effort I don’t really see what I look like. Instead I see how much I diverge from what I think I should look like.

At the moment I’m down about thirty pounds from my heaviest weight of 218. At 190 I weigh what I weighed when I got out of high school nearly thirty years ago, and—though I was a fairly serious martial arts type athlete back then—I’m actually in better shape now. I’ve lost thirty pounds total but more like forty pounds of fat, and I’ve packed on a lot of muscle. Honestly, even when I was heavier I wasn’t in terrible shape or really all that fat.

By any objective measure I look much better and am in much better shape than I was five years ago.

But I don’t see it. Not unless I actively try to do so. Even then, it’s hard. What I see is the five pounds or so of body fat that I have left, and, if I let it, it makes me angry and depressed and pushes all my self-loathing buttons.

Best part? The closer I get to the ideal I see in my head, the worse the dismorphia gets. I think that’s because I can see the me that I think I’m supposed to be more easily as the bits that don’t fit that image get peeled away.

One particularly charming aspect of the whole thing is that it’s not actually possible for me to make my body fit the image in my head. Not even if I lose that last five pounds of fat and and pack on another fifteen of muscle. That’s because the image in my head isn’t just in perfect shape, it’s also a fundamentally different body type. I am a human tank, broad shouldered and thick everywhere—a natural born weightlifter—while the image in my head is more the dancer or runner type.

Nothing I can do is going to transform me into that person. Yet it’s what my brain thinks I ought to be. I suspect that this image comes from a combination of media images, the year I spent in that shape after I hit puberty and before I filled out, and the decade I spent immersed in theater and dance between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. Dance and theater are major breeding grounds for dismorphia.

At forty-five I have much better mental and emotional tools to deal with the dismorphia and what it wants to do to my sense of self, but it’s a battle that I have to fight and win anew every single day. It never gives up, it never goes away, and it’s never ever farther away than the next mirror. It has danced me along the edge of the land of eating disorders, it daily takes the edge off my joy at being as fit as I am now, and I know that it will always be waiting for me on the bad days.

I won’t let dismorphia beat me, but it will always be there trying.