Writing – Page 4 – Kelly McCullough

Know When to Hold ‘Em and When to Fold ‘Em

Almost every professional writer or artist or performer that I know has a deciding-not-to-quit story—that moment when they decided to persist in the face of great adversity and keep writing or dancing or pursuing their photography. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s a tough, draining, demoralizing road, and sometimes you want to give up…and that’s okay. Sometimes giving up is the right answer. Sometimes, you’re not on the right road. I say this as someone who has succeeded at writing to a degree that’s incredibly rare. I also say this as someone who decided to quit, and walked away from acting.

I didn’t always want to be a writer. In fact, I didn’t seriously try to write anything for publication until I was in my early twenties. My degree is in theater with a performance focus. At the age of eleven I stumbled into an acting class by accident—a story I’ve told elsewhere. I stumbled into acting and I fell in love. I was a pudgy awkward kind of kid, raised on Shakespeare as much as Tolkien, with a storyteller’s instincts and a quick mind. Theater was perfect for me.

It let me play at being someone else—someone better and more handsome and funnier—and it gave me a sort of simulated popularity that I’d never experienced before. When I was on the stage I was cool, and I could make people laugh or clap—or, at least, that’s how it felt when I got the laughter and applause. It felt great, and I became wholly focused on the goal of becoming an actor from around the age of twelve. I took classes, I acted in plays, I did improv, and various sorts of performing with Renaissance festivals. I was quite good, and I know people from those days who say that they thought I was one of the few who could actually make it and earn a living as a performer.

They’re probably right. I could probably have made it to a place where I was getting enough character parts in paying shows to barely scrape by…at least for a while. But I was never going to make it big. I was never going to become a star of stage or film. At best, I might have become a big fish in some local community theater pond. That’s nothing to laugh at or condemn, but it’s not what I wanted.

I wanted the dream, and I simply wasn’t hungry enough, or pretty enough, or funny enough to manage it. I wanted it, but other people wanted it more, and many of them were better than I was ever going to be. I mostly pretended to myself that wasn’t true, but there were moments where I could see it, and again, there’s no shame in that. I was good, and I could have been very good, but you have to be great, and lucky, and, to borrow a phrase from the late Jay Lake, you have to have psychotic persistence. Being gorgeous is a huge help too. But I kept at it. I worked hard to get better. I tried.

And then I met the woman I was eventually going to marry, and I started thinking more deeply about my future and what I could accomplish and what would make me happy, and I had to make the hardest decision I’d ever made to that point, the decision to quit theater. I still loved it, and to this day there are parts of the whole enterprise that I miss enormously, but it was never going to make me happy, because I was never going to get where I wanted to go with it. So, I walked away, and I haven’t done a show since. It wasn’t easy and it still hurts sometimes, like I cut a part of myself off forever, but it was the right choice, and I’ve never doubted that. Just like I’ve never doubted my decision not to quit writing at a particularly low point in my life a decade or so ago.

I have friends who’ve walked away from the arts completely and who are much happier for it. Sometimes, you have to fold your cards and walk away from that particular table. Sometimes, quitting is the right choice.

A number of years ago I was sitting around a table with a bunch of novelists at the World Fantasy Convention talking about the people we knew who had started when we did but then later walked away from writing for one reason or another. It was very much an Auld Lang Syne moment—old friends fallen away as time passed and the road grew too steep or the costs to high for them to keep along the path—and every one of us was aware how easily that could have been us. I know people who are better natural writers than I am who couldn’t continue, or harder workers, or who got a much faster start. We all did. There’s no shame in it, only sadness for what might have been. On Thursday, my brother-in-law and fellow Wyrdsmith announced his decision to fold out of the game. I wrote this mostly for him, but also for all the other writers I know who’ve made that same decision.

So, deciding not to quit or deciding to quit. I’ve made both choices in my life, and I don’t regret either one. The important thing isn’t what you ultimately decide, it’s that you make the right decision for you.

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

I do so hate these formal portrait sessions.

Have I mentioned recently that I despise you?

If you’ll just hold still I think I can make this jump…

Lady trying to take a bath here.

I smell tuna. Is it you?

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog Nov 21 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Reblog: Proposals and Series Vs. Standalone

Part 1: The Blueprint

One of the bigger changes in my mental model of writing over the last five years is that I no longer loathe and fear synopses and proposals. In fact, I have actually come to enjoy writing them. In part this is a function of practice. I’ve done a lot of these at this point, something on the order of 30, and as with all writing tasks, it gets easier with repetition. But even more, I think it is because I’ve spent the last five years working in the WebMage world with all its interesting bugs and limitations.Now, don’t get me wrong, I love WebMage and it’s been enormous fun to write. At the same time, it’s not a story that was originally intended to become a series. In fact, it wasn’t even originally intended to become a novel. The process went like this:

It started out as a short story. Then it grew a second (never published) short story. Then those two merged into the first half of the book. Then I wrote a third short that eventually became the opening of book II which grew from there. Then I had to come up with one more rough plot, CodeSpell, and a sketchy idea, MythOS. Then I wrote a series closer that had to incorporate all the earlier stuff and tie it up into a neat package.

This was a lot of fun but it also involved a lot of work in terms of making it all fit together and look like a cohesive whole. Picture a one room cabin that slowly accretes additions until it becomes a small mansion. It can be done in a way that produces something with architectural integrity and style, but it’s a hell of a lot more work to do it that way than it would have been to start out by designing a mansion from the blueprints up.

The same is true of series book proposals. In the past five years I’ve written series proposals for four separate series, two with a complete book attached, two with chapters. In all four cases, I knew from the first moment that I was writing a multi-book saga and was able to put all the story equivalents of pouring the slab, electrical runs, plumbing, and facade into the blueprint ahead of time instead of ripping out and replacing the original inadequate hookups or simply making do.

The end result of that advance planning should be a much more cohesive and seamless whole. In the case of one of the series (a trilogy actually), where I went ahead and wrote book II on spec as well, I was able to see how much simpler it was to get book II written and running with all the foundations waiting for it. It wasn’t a perfect fit and there were things in book II that made me go back and make minor adjustments to book I, but overall it was a much simpler and stronger process. The proposal is the blueprint, and if you get that right it means a lot less work and kludging down the road.

Part 2: Structure without planning—WebMageSo, as mentioned abve, WebMage accreted into a series rather than being planned as one. But what does that mean? How is planning for a series different?

Let’s start with the short-story version of WebMage’s plot and the things I didn’t think about beforehand. The short story WebMage was all about Ravirn’s successful escape after a hacking run. Because it was essentially a chase story, it really didn’t matter why Ravirn had hacked Atropos beyond for the hell of it (strongly implied in the short). Fine motivation for a short story, but ultimately unsatisfying for a novel. Because it was a short the long term effects of the cost of that escape didn’t matter when I was writing the short. So, at the end we have Ravirn with the enmity of one of the Fates, a knee that’s thoroughly hashed, short a fingertip, and in no real shape to do anything but lie in bed and recover. Fine in a short, more problematic in chapter three of a novel with a whole book left for him to limp through.

Then there’s world. In the short all I had to do for the magic system was put together the rough framework and then decorate it with the bits that I needed to make the plot work. A novel needs a lot more than that, and if I’d been planning for more story, there are things I would have made simpler or stronger. Names are another issue. At short story length I just grabbed cool stuff and didn’t worry too much about making a coherent culture of it. Likewise culturally, the colors my characters wore and the pseudo-Elizabethan court structure, both done because they were cool and at short length coherence wasn’t really an issue.

Finally, character: Ravirn and the Fates were basically perfectly workable characters for the longer run of a novel, so no real problems at the first order build-out level. Cerice and Melchior however both needed a lot more room to grow. A good part of the familiar underground subplot was by way of making the expanded Melchior make sense. As for Cerice, I don’t think I really got her to work fully the way I wanted until book V.

So, a good deal of the structure of WebMage the novel went into mitigating and justifying the cost of the events of the short and into making that set of scenes make sense in a larger context. A fair amount of work also went into ret-conning the magic system to make it work for the novel. Culture had to be justified and characters twisted and expanded. I’m quite happy with the result but it was an enormous amount of work to get it there and I suspect that if I’d been planning ahead I could have achieved better results with less wordage, which in turn would have given me room to make things richer elsewhere.

There were similar problems moving from the stand-alone WebMage novel into an open ended series a piece at a time as I did, most notably with Cerice (who worked very well as a love interest in the original happily ever after ending of WebMage but not so much over multiple books), Tisiphone (who I straightjacketed in book I much more than I would have had I known how big a part she was going to play going forward), the magic system (see the handing off of the mweb system from Fate to Necessity), and plot (having your main character go up against Fate in book I doesn’t leave you a lot of room to step back down into a more human scale of story or, on the other end, much space for a bigger badder baddie). Again, I’m happy with the results, and in particular with some of the choices forced on me by the original structure of Tisiphone, but I think it could have been done better with only a little more forethought.

I don’t regret a single choice I made with WebMage but man, looking forward, a lot of them are choices I’m glad I won’t have to make with the next set of books.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog in two parts Nov 17 and Dec 3 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Fast writing and ball dropping

I’m working on a new book proposal, about which more later. My current self-imposed deadline is tomorrow so I can give it to the Wyrdsmiths before I send it off to my agent. The process has me really thinking about writing again for the first time in a while. I’m writing fast at the moment, which means that I’m dropping some of the balls I’m juggling. This is not a big deal, as I will pick them up again on the polish pass—as I usually do—but it’s very interesting to see which balls are getting lost at this stage. They fall into three main categories:

1) Sentence level stuff. In particular, articles. The faster I write the less I write “the.” I think that’s my brain not typing bits that can easily be inserted later. updated to add: Also conjunctions. Apparently this post was written fast as I missed at least one above—or, at least that’s what Laura tells me.

2) Smells and other sensory details. As my focus narrows I lose senses, starting with smell. This is a mirror of the real world. I don’t have a great sense of smell to start with and on top of that I have the ability/liability to focus on what I’m doing so intensely that a lot of things get sort of grayed out as I’m working intensely on something. It’s nice that when I do that I can block out the cat barfing in the hall. It’s less so that I block out being hungry, having to go to the bathroom, or, at really intense levels, things like my tendons screaming that I need to take a break right now or I’ll pay for it later.

3) Character descriptions, and this is the one that really tells me I’m writing up at the edge of what I can do in terms of speed and still remain coherent. I’m a plot and world focused writer and that means that all my character skills are a deliberate effort of craft layered on top of the bedrock stuff. It’s a deeply laid skill set at this point, deep enough that I no longer need to think about it at the conscious level much, and I haven’t dropped it in years. But yesterday I decided to swap the gender of one of the minor characters and, as I was making the necessary changes, I realized I hadn’t described them at all because that wasn’t an important aspect of the plot function they were originally serving. However, the change will bring them deeper into the story and, at that level, what they look like becomes important enough that not knowing what they looked like rang bells for me.

Which brings me back to my polish pass comment. At this point in my writing life what I turn in to my editor is very close to what I think of as my first actual draft—the stuff I hand to Wyrdsmiths—after I’ve read through the rough again and fixed sentences, put in (some*) sensory detail, and done things like describing minor characters. I sometimes forget that there even is a step between putting it on the page and handing it in, because polish typically happens in an hour or two the day before we meet, and I don’t have to pay a lot of forebrain attention to it. Despite that it’s a critical step and one that probably doesn’t get talked about enough by experienced writers.

*There are always more details added after Wyrdsmiths, especially smells, plus larger fixes.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog Nov 11 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

(reblog) Monday Morning Open Thread and WIP

Hey all,

Finally back from my travels. 3 trips, 4 time zones, 8 states, 15 days. I’ll write up a trip a trip/meeting/con report in a couple of days including cool stuff and a Smart car on the road report. In the meantime, what’s everyone doing?

On the writing front: I’m still in the limbo between turning the last book in and hearing back from my editor/proposing the next book. So I’m thinking about writing a new first 3 chapters to my 2nd book (silly fantasy ala Pratchett) so I can move it from basement storage to agent and active submission. I’m also thinking about pulling out the opening chapters of what would have been my 4th book (high fantasy) if I hadn’t shifted to short stories, and seeing if I can’t turn it into a book proposal that Jack might be able to sell. I’m feeling a little under-productive after a month off writing and that would give me 8 series out under submission as well as soaking up some of this downtime between Ace projects. Oh, and I have to get the final polish on Eye of Horus but that’s only got one pass left to make so it’ll only eat 2-3 days.

For the rest of life: The house needs to be restored to it’s pre-July state. The gardens have weeds. I’ve gained back 4 of the pounds I’d lost, which means I’ve now 15 to go in getting back to my high school weight of 185. Originally it was 35 so I’m still doing all right, but it would have been nice to not have gained any at all during the trip season. The cats are in need of much reassurance as to their position at the center of the universe. I have about a million emails to deal with and I’m sure there’s other house stuff that I’ve forgotten about beyond simple restoration.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog Aug 3 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Art and Death and Finding the Right Words

I recently had an experience that both moved and shook me. I’m going to tell that story first and then I’m going to try to talk about being a writer and experiencing a moment both from within and at one remove. The story:

I was on vacation in the Dominican Republic when I got an urgent message from my friend Pamela Gay—a gifted astronomer and podcaster.

A very close friend of hers, author and podcaster P.G. (Patrick) Holyfield, was dying of cancer—quite possibly within the next few hours—and would it be possible for me to record a goodbye message for him because my books had been important to him.

I don’t know if I can quite convey how that hit me. I’ve never met Patrick and I didn’t really know anything about him before that moment. I had one moment of complete terror when I read the message. What could I possibly say to a dying man that might make his path a little easier? While my forebrain was trying to get a grip on that, my backbrain was typing a reply to Pamela. Of course I would do it.

How could I not?

Here was a dear friend asking a favor for a dying man who had cared about my words. How could I not find a few more to help him on his way? For that matter, even if Pamela wasn’t someone I care about, even if you removed her from the equation, the question still stands. It was simply the right thing to do.

So, I grabbed my iPhone and I walked out into the dark tropical night and I recorded a message. I did it in several short fits as I struggled to find the right words and my voice kept trying to break as I did it. I don’t know if it eased Patrick’s passing—I hope that it helped at least a little—but I’m told that his family was aware that I was a writer that mattered to him and that it meant a lot to them.

As I finished my recording, the sky opened up and started pouring rain. If I were religious, I might take that as a sign of some sort and maybe find comfort in it. But I’m not, and that’s not how I find meaning. I find it in the right words. I’m finding it as I write this, I was finding it that night as I spoke to a dying man, and I will find it in the future as my brain cannibalizes the experience and puts bits of it into my fiction.

Because that’s what writers do. We analyze and pick and pull and we try to find ways to lay out the bits we extract so that others can see them. The shiny bits. The sweet bits. The horrible bits. All of them. And we don’t just do it later, we do it in the moment, and sometimes we hate ourselves while we’re doing it.

My grandmother, Phyllis Neese, was a second mother to me. I loved her completely and unreservedly. When she died a few years ago it gutted me. And I used that. I stood by her bedside after they disconnected the life support and I waited for the monitors to go still, even though it tore at me to do it. I did it because I loved her and because I owed it to her and because it was the right thing to do.

And every second that I stood there, a part of my brain was standing back and looking on at what I was doing and how it felt, and it made notes. I couldn’t not, and it made me feel like a vampire—here I was in one the hardest, rawest, most devastating moments of my life, and I was making mental notes about it for later use.

It wasn’t the first time, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last, and I really didn’t much like that part of myself in the moment. Nor for years after. It seemed somehow horrible and inhuman, and it wasn’t until I was trying to think of words to say to a dying man that I found a different sort of meaning for that experience. Just as it had with my grandmother, a part of me was standing back and observing the part of me that was talking to Patrick.

It seemed ghoulish at first, but then I realized something. The part of me that had stepped back and watched while my grandmother died was handing me things from that moment to use in the present one. The part that stood and took notes while I was hurting was the same part that gave me what I needed to at least try to ease another person’s death. It’s not a vampire, it’s a witness.

We step outside of ourselves in these moments so that later, when someone needs the right words, we have a place in our hearts where the hard things are written: a record that we can share and maybe, just maybe, ease the pain for someone else. As writers, when we hurt or grieve or bleed, we stand apart in some ways and we take notes. We do it because we can. We do it because we must. We do it because somebody has to try to find the right words.

For the first time in my life I’m entirely at peace with the observer in my head. I don’t know how much my words helped Patrick that night, but I know that trying to find them helped me—that Patrick helped me. I’d like to believe that, through this essay, they’ll help a few more people along the way.

P. G. Holyfield was a writer. He knew what it meant to try to find the right words, and I hope that he would be pleased to know that he’s helped someone else to find a few of them.

Thank you, Patrick. Hail and Farewell.

_______________________________________

The original post about P.G. Holyfield’s cancer diagnosis and sudden decline can be found at specficmedia.com.

Pamela Gay has written a touching tribute and farewell to her friend P.G. Holyfield at her site.

Finally, I want to say a quick thank you to my friend, essayist and generally wonderful writer Patrick Rhone for taking a look at this essay and reassuring me that it was something I ought to share with people.

Musings on Art and Practice and Joy

I want to make a point about art and success and failure and practice and motivation. Over the course of my 47 years on the planet I have mucked around with visual art, music, dance, acting, martial arts, 3D design, and writing. I have been decent at some of those, good or even very good at others, and I now make my living writing. There is a reason that I left many of those things behind while mastering the writing,* and that’s what I want to talk about here. It’s going to be a bit rambly because there’s no way to get at this without providing a good bit of background.

I recently had reason to want to sketch something. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary skills. Not anymore, anyway. My degree is in theater, and, as part of that I took a fair number of design classes. If you can’t draw a set or costume concept you can’t really build it. Now, I never got very good at free-handing an original composition, but I did get to be pretty solid on architectural style projections and good if never great at copying line drawings and altering them to suit what I needed. So for example, drawing a rose from scratch was more or less beyond me, but taking a small sketch of a rose that someone else had done and copying and altering that copy at a larger scale to create a drawing of multiple roses was something I could do well and with relative ease.

Which brings me back to the thing I wanted to sketch this morning. It was a pretty simple composition and something I could easily have done when I was in practice. But I quit doing that practice when I left theater for writing. At that time, my writing skills weren’t all that much better than my drawing skills. Some, certainly, but not bunches.

I’m going to leave that there for a moment and jump over to music which is the absolute bottom end of my range. I have never been particularly good with musical things. I have a decent ear, and a wide vocal range—one of my theater voice teachers characterized it as one of the widest she’d had in a student. I can even carry a tune…briefly. On the other hand, my rhythm is terrible and while I can hit the notes, I tend to jump keys from verse to verse. I noodled around enough with guitar and piano to discover that learning the fingering was relatively easy. What I lacked was drive and timing.

I was a decent dramatic actor, and a good comedic one, possibly even very good when it came to improv. But even very good isn’t enough to make a living at it. I had the physical chops for the dance side of the business, but there again my lack of rhythm was an insurmountable barrier. Those skills worked better in martial arts, but injuries sidelined me out of that arena. I’m still quite good at 3D design—good enough to design and build complex structures in steel that involve cutting, grinding, and welding.

The reason I’m still decent with 3D design is that, for me, it’s fun and useful. From my first encounters with it, I had enough talent to complete things that were functional, if not pretty, and to see where I was failing and how to get better. The same is true of writing, only more so.

From my earliest compositions for classes I have always been able to express myself better than most. Teachers gave me praise, and even when it felt like a huge and painful chore I had a sense of accomplishment when I finished something. Sure, many of those things are awful by my current standards, but by comparison to my then-peers I was always doing pretty well.

When I first bailed out of theater, I sat down and wrote a novel in about four months. It’s not a very good novel, though it’s not utterly awful. More than that though, I had a ball writing it. Even when I completely punted sentences or whole scenes, I could see that it was actually a book and I could see it day to day. It was a practice novel—though I didn’t know it at the time—and the practice was fun because I was accomplishing something in the exact same way that I was accomplishing things with 3D design.

I was making something visibly useful and entertaining even if it wasn’t up to professional standards. I never had that feeling of accomplishment with dance or music, or really even drawing and drafting. I wasn’t good enough to find the practice an end in itself, and so, I wasn’t motivated to do it and get better. I had many of the necessary tools to become good at those things, but I never did, and it was all about joy. I take joy in writing and building things and so I have gotten very good at them. I took joy in acting and martial arts, but other things caused me to leave them behind.

There have been several roads I could have followed in life, even several forms of art that I might have mastered. What has drawn me into my present career as a science fiction and fantasy author was joy in the practice as well as the end result. Without that, I don’t think that I would have succeeded. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the secret of my success so far is simple:

Finding joy in practice.

____________________________________

*I’m not prone to false modesty, or really, modesty at all. I’m not as good a writer as I intend to be someday, but I’m very, very good at it.

Sometimes you Feel Like a Duck

Saw one of those writer posts that makes me feel an odd duck. My authorial dream has never been the JK Rowling rich and famous package. My goal has always been to simply write the stuff I want to write and make enough money so I don’t have do work that isn’t writing.

Mind you, I wouldn’t say no to the whole NYT bestseller and movies thing it if it came along. It’s just never been a first order goal. More than that, I have friends who are at that level of success and it’s not without it’s downsides.

I’ve never been all that award or critic focused either. My main goal from day one has been to produce fast, fun books that casual readers and fans can love, with a strong secondary goal of not making my peers and more critical readers want to fling the book across the room. Basically, what I am trying to do is produce well written commercial fiction that a broad spectrum of people can have fun reading. I do try to put in layers for those who want to look for them, and I am enormously happy when people who are better prose artists than I am like my work, but really I just want to write stories that people want to read. Everything else is gravy.

Writerman Theme

Writerman, Writerman,
Does whatever a writer can
Spins a tale, any size,
Catches readers just like flies
Book Out!
Here comes the Writerman.

Is he prolix?
Like a jinx,
He’s got radioactive inks.
Can he write on demand?
Typing or longhand!
Hey, there
There goes the Writerman.

On the blank of the page
With a pen nib so fine
For the lowest of wage
He writes to deadline.

Writerman, Writerman
Friendly neighborhood Writerman
Wealth and fame?
He’s quite ignored.
The STORY is his reward.

For him, life is a bildungsroman
To drama and wit he is drawn
You’ll read the Writer man!

Public Metrics

Anyone who has followed me on social media for any length of time knows that I generally post my wordcounts and workout metrics. Anyone who has followed me through the end of a book knows that I also post my edit metrics to the extent that is possible.

There’s a reason for that. Well, several, actually. Since I am occasionally asked about it, I thought I would put together a post, so I can point people at the long form answer when it comes up. So, in rough order of importance…

1) Accountability. I am my own boss. With the exception of a few hard deadlines in the course of a book’s production, I don’t answer to anyone for anything. I don’t have to have a daily wordcount. I don’t have to have a weekly one. I don’t have to workout. All those things are my personal marks to hit. Since I’m lazy as well as a workaholic (both true, don’t ask) I know how easy it would be for me to ignore the work until the last minute. But you can’t do that with a book.

A book is an endurance event, and you have to keep chipping away at it. Likewise getting and staying in shape. It’s a daily process, no last minute cramming. By posting my metrics for all the world to see, I’m forcing myself to have a visible personal mark, and when I faceplant, I do it in the open. It keeps me honest and makes a huge difference in getting things done.

2) Visible model of a working artist. When I started writing there was no real internet, no good way to see what the day-to-day of a working writer looks like. Turns out, it’s fairly boring. You get up, you do your not-writing work, mostly sitting on your ass in front of a computer, you write, likewise mostly sitting on your ass in front of a computer. Posting my metrics provides a model for people who are interested in becoming writers. Hey, that’s how McCullough does it, maybe I can do it too… And, the workouts? If you’re a writer and you don’t have a fitness regime of some sort, all that ass sitting will turn you into a giant bowl of pudding.

Part of providing a model is posting when I fall behind or below my goals as well. Hey, look, I’m behind. Hey, look, I didn’t make my goals for the week. Hey, look, my brain took the day off and the rest of me went with it. Hey, look, I decided not to lift heavy things. Having to post that stuff is motivational for me—I REALLY don’t like failing. It also shows that you can do this and faceplant from time to time and still come out fine. I have never missed a deadline yet, though I know it will happen eventually.

3) It entertains me. Much of what I do I do because it entertains me. I did a university classroom visit recently—they were reading WebMage. The professor asked me:

So, I see that you have a ton of little references and in-jokes in this book that your target audience will probably miss—the “Say goodnight, Gracie” joke for example. I’m a generation older than you are, and that one isn’t something even everyone of my age would get. Since your audience is mostly a generation younger than you are, why do you put that in? Or some of the more obscure Shakespeariana?

My answer: Because it entertains me. There are other reasons as well, but the main reason I do many things is because they amuse or entertain me. Posting my metrics both bad and good entertains me.

4) Writing is a solitary business. I work at home alone, with only cats to keep me company. I am also an extrovert. I adore throwing parties and hanging out with cool people. Basically, I sustain myself with the blood of the living. Writing doesn’t give me much chance to do that. And, no, working in coffee shops or other crowded venues doesn’t work for me. I’ve tried. I’m about ten times as productive working in the quiet with no one around, and I need to be that productive to stay on top of my workload. Posting metrics is my equivalent of having coworkers or hanging out with the other gym rats—and no I don’t actually enjoy working out with other people either. I do much better when I’m competing only against myself.

5) Social media presence. One of the things that the modern working writer really needs is a way to reach out to fans. In my case, I use social media, and social media is hungry, it needs content. Sometimes that content is funny bits that fall out of my head. Sometimes it’s microfiction like Dragon Diaries. In any case, you need to keep feeding it. Metrics make a good snack.

So, I post my metrics good and bad to stay accountable. I do it to show beginning writers what my day looks like. I do it because it entertains me. I do it because social activity keeps me sane. I do it because it works as promotion and engagement. For me at least, posting my metrics is a huge win.