I thought I was a gamer

I came to a conclusion about my identity the other day that was a bit surprising. I've always considered myself to be a gamer. A gamer "light", if you will. I started with my first Gameboy in the 90s, and continued with early Apple computer games (Lode Runner, especially), and then progressed to the life-changing Nintendo 64 (Zelda, what what!).

After that, I started playing games like Age of Empires, where I could design and explore my own kingdoms, or Petz, which allowed me to create my own cat and dog breeds and customize my own "house" (backgrounds where the animals romped around, in essence). But what really lit my 14-year-old fire was my introduction to online role-playing games with "Vampires! The Dark Alleyway".

"Vampires!" was very basic mechanically: I'd click these dark squares to "move" through the city, clicking white underlined text to drink the blood of humans or other vampires I encountered. But where the game came to life was across Yahoo group forums, where self-proclaimed "clans" of vampires would write pages and pages describing their movements around the city, envisioning their characters and locations, and detailing their interactions that other players could then play off of, adding to the script. There were wars, marriages, clan raids, vendettas... and I continued seeking out games like that, ending up in SecondLife, where you can be anything, meet anyone, travel anywhere.

I thought all of that made me a gamer. That, and Grand Theft Auto and Halo and Guitar Hero and Archeage and other WoW-style MMORPGs (and too many other games to list). But I've come to realize that the games that most captured my attention were the ones that allowed me creative freedom. The bigger the world, the more invested I became in my adopted identity. And it wasn't because I'm a gamer by nature. It's because I'm a writer. And that identity has always felt too big, too lofty to aspire to.

I'm beginning to come around and accept my identity as a writer. The more I put down the games, the more I focus on honing my craft, and fitting into that role. The same inspiration that made me click that white, underlined "drink" button, the same imagination that allowed me to visualize the human brought to their knees in front of me, that's what fuels my writing.

Identities change. And it's very rewarding to find yourself proud of your identity when you finally realize it fits.

Crossing Genres

I've been slowly working my way through Book 3 of "In Caves & Catacombs", and my characters have developed... feelings. It's strange, when a book takes on a life of its own. That neat little outline that I wrote begins to expand and contract, breaking its constraints to become something entirely different. In the case of "The City", it has evolved from a post-apocalyptic solo through the remains of Southern California to a team effort. I dare say it's becoming a bit of a romance.

Romances are hard for me to write. Not because I don't enjoy writing them, because I do. I love a good romance! But writing one is difficult because there are so many elements inspired from my personal life. Many of my characters in my writing are rather obviously inspired by my friends and family. That red-headed mermaid in Out of the Efrenen Sea? Yeah, that's me. Well--she used to be me, anyway, before she deepened enough to be a character entirely separate from my being.

You see, if I strictly wrote about myself or the other folks that inspire my characters, it wouldn't be weird. I wouldn't be paranoid about it, because truth be told, I'm a rather boring person in real life (except for the mermaid tail, but that's another story for another blog post).

My characters, on the other hand, are decidedly less boring. And when the fictional characters start to make their own decisions, I start to worry about the way their inspiration might be perceived. In my head, they become unique and completely detached from their original inspiration. But do my friends and family know that? Or are they seeing me linger in a description about the connection between April and Will, wondering if that's how my husband and I speak or interact?

To move forward, I've had to stop worrying about what people will think. There's no time for insecurity when there's a story to be told.

It's like a romantic stroll through the snow, but with fallout.

A twist of the knife

"The Grave" has changed the entire direction of the "In Caves & Catacombs" series, and I love it. But the more you love something, the more frightened you are of it, for it, by it. It scares me because it's dark, but is it dark enough? Does it honor the veteran experience enough? Does it honor the struggle of being homeless enough? Is it, in and of itself, enough?

I'm afraid the truth is that it isn't enough. I fear that I haven't done it justice, and that bothers me. There's that twinge of regret, that twist of the knife, that if I held onto it longer, if I worked it more, that it could be so much better. The same goes for "The Boat", and the same will go for the next three or four installments in the series. Hell, the same thing will happen to the Efrenen Sea series. I could hold onto it for ten more years. Perfect it. Coddle it. Shield it from the light and critics alike. But it'll only make me fear it more. And I'm the most afraid of letting the fear hold me back from accomplishing all the things I want to accomplish.

Now that I've said it, it gives me peace. Because nothing I write is ever going to be good enough, and that's okay. My husband tells me that I'm too hard on myself, and he's right. I push and push because I feel like I don't measure up. But that's good, in some ways. Because that's what motivates me to keep going. I don't expect anything big to happen. I don't expect to be able to quit my day job to write full time. What I want from this venture is for people to read what I produce and to enjoy it. It's so simple--I just want to entertain you. And there's a darkness in that, all my own.

Bo Burnham hits the anguish of it absolutely perfectly... hang with this all the way through to the end (it really happens around the five minute mark, but seriously, watch the whole thing), and you'll see the connection: 

Full show available on NETFLIX.

I don't think I can handle this right now, either. So I'm going to go back to writing the third installment, God help me.

Evolving Process

As I edit the draft of my novel, I've noticed my writing process is evolving. My previous process went something like this:

Me, staring angrily at my computer screen instead of writing.

But my writing process changed, and now I've been able to write a full length novel and several short stories. There were two Big Things that changed to liberate me from angry staredowns with my laptop. The first is outlining, and the second is counting my words.

Outlining. *Shudder*. The word brings me back to middle school. All of my English teachers taught me that step one was to create an outline for my essays. I hated it. I much preferred writing out all of my ideas, and then going back to organize them. I hated outlining so much that when I had to turn in my outlines for points, I sneakily wrote the essay first, then crafted the outline to turn in. Thus, when I began writing creatively (not for points, and not for dollars), I still shunned the very idea of an outline. It seemed antithetical to include something so academic in my creative outlet. 

I don't even know how I'm going to finish this blog post with this image in here, it's that uninspiring.

Eventually, I decided that I would finish a novel, but I didn't know how. I had so many beginnings, so many ideas scribbled on looseleaf, so many chapters saved onto my hard drive, and not one full story arc to my name. So I began outlining instead. I found it deeply satisfying to create a story from beginning to end, and it made me excited to fill in the gaps. It directed my energy, because I knew what had to come next, and even if I wrote like crap to get from Chapter One to Chapter Two, at least I got that far.

Outlining gave me direction, but it was counting words that pushed me to follow through. I became obsessed with my word count when I began NaNoWriMo, but what's in a word count when you're writing something that's not a minimum of fifty thousand words? Motivation, that's what.

Not that kind of motivation. REAL motivation.

But if outlining is academic, surely adding math would ruin the artistic process, right? Nope, not for me. I'm so Type A that I find meeting my word count goal inspiring. And the truth is that I tend to think I'm finished with a chapter with only half of my needed word count. That's where I push through. I look at my count, review my outline, and more often than not, it turns out I haven't written enough or described enough, and my characters haven't developed enough. And that's where my best writing comes from. When I'm motivated to meet this tiny little chapter word count goal, it gives me what I need, piece by piece, to meet my hundred thousand word novel goal.

So try combining that crap from school that you hated with your writing. You might be surprised by the results!

"Throwaway" Writing

I am easily distracted. I tend to get started on something big, then when that long-awaited moment of writing inspiration strikes, it has the potential to sink me into a whole new project. I have a word for these harried, late-night scribbles--I call them my "throwaways". These are the dream inspirations, character examinations, setting descriptions, or illustrations of a feeling, like so:

If you click the photo, you can support my writing habit

“We’re almost there,” I say cheerily, strutting ahead despite my own frustration, and we continue along the road, withdrawing from the seasonal colors of the meadow into open countryside, complete with lush, fruited grapevines lining the road. I approach a climbing vine on the wire fence and stare at one dark, fat cluster of grapes that dangle obscenely. My mouth waters and the color skips like a missed heartbeat, it’s purple purple purple blue, and I have to raise my eyes away before it lifts me off the road.

I got in trouble for calling that a "throwaway". An author friend of mine had to sternly set me straight on it, not once, but twice in the last week. And honestly, does this particular scribble have promise? Heck, I don't know. But I do know that referring to these as "throwaway" pieces is a terrible misnomer. It's self-deprecating, it cheapens the work, and it fails to highlight the opportunity they present. Sometimes it takes someone outside of ourselves to point it out.

Don't be afraid to scribble, even if it's just an exercise. But don't sell yourself short. Every moment you spend creating shouldn't be thrown away. And maybe, if you're really onto something, it'll be the seedling for your next poem, short story, or novel. Whatever it is, don't let it wilt and die. You never know what it can become if you take the time to breathe a little more life into it.

Book 2: The Grave Release Date

Alright folks, I am back at it and finishing up "The Grave", which is the second book in the "In Caves & Catacombs" series of short stories. In fact, I've made so much progress that I even have a pre-order release date:

May 1st, 2017

Woohoo! *tries not to panic about what feels like a lofty goal* In preparation for launch (and to make sure I stay on track), I will be releasing new, unedited, pre-release teasers here, so be sure to subscribe to get the latest information.

If you enjoyed the "The Boat", get ready for "The Grave", which will feature a whole new set of characters in the same apocalyptic universe setting, in a similar quick-read format. Here's a tidbit from Chapter Two:

---

        “Of course I’m listening,” she declared. “But you have to understand, this isn’t news to us. We’ve got three of them in the back right now that we’re tending to. It’s happening everywhere.”
        “So it is contagious,” he reached out his finger to scroll down the screen as he continued to read.
        “Sure as heck is. They say if it goes airborne they’re going to start quarantining areas to ‘clean it out’. You’re former military—you know what that means,” she waved the possibility off like it wasn’t real. “Right now it’s just like any virus, you gotta get all up in somebody’s business to catch it. Spit or snot, stuff like that. I don’t need to paint you a picture, do I?”
        He looked over the bright screen into her crows-feet framed blue eyes. They had the kind of brightness he used to see in the mirror. He frowned. Was she… excited by the possibility of the apocalypse? Or just excited to catch him up on the grim state of the world?
        “Nah, I think I got it. So don’t get up in anybody’s business that looks sick, huh?”
        “That’s right. If I were you, I’d skedaddle. Go to the beach or the woods, wait until this all blows over.”
        “Why dontcha come with me, Cyn? We could have a hell of a time on the beach.”
        He leaned over the desk again, approximating a wink. He hadn’t done it in so long, he probably just blinked.
        She guffawed, slapping her knees and waving him off, just like she’d waved off the possibility of martial law and government-sanctioned mass murder. Still, it was a better response than he’d expected.

---

If you want to be added to my mailing list to be the first to learn about release dates, promotions, and giveaways, please do so by visiting the Contact page of the website.

Conscious Writing

Years ago, I had the terrifying epiphany that many young adults experience: that life was happening faster than I was consciously aware of. I couldn't have been older than sixteen or seventeen, and there I was, contemplating my own powerlessness in the face of time. It was too heavy then to process, and so I didn't, and instead descended happily back into focusing on my anxiety over the "small things".

Years later, I experienced it all over again as an abrupt, unwelcome awareness of myself and the unyielding passage of time. But this time I remembered that this sense of overwhelming consciousness had happened once before, and it felt good, as if I had slowed time just by being aware of it. It was a revelation, and I felt that by being conscious, I was somehow cheating death. And I continued thinking about it and wondered if perhaps there was a way to maintain that awareness, to stay awake long term, and maybe it would make my life feel longer. So I did what any Type A overthinker would do--I penciled it into my schedule. Literally. I added it to my daily calendar as a reminder to "WAKE UP!" every day at 6pm, and for about a year, I did just that. I would stop what I was doing at 6pm damn near every day, and think about where my life was and where I wanted it to go. I also took those moments to be happy for the successes I'd had or witnessed, no matter how small, and reflected on my failures and how I could grow from them.

I don't have that reminder set anymore, and I'm no longer focused on cheating death. And although it's not every single day that I practice "waking up", I'd like to think it's become a part of my lifestyle. I do my best to live with my eyes wide open. And I love being able to explore the world around me and connect with the earth and the people that inhabit it. Life is beautiful, even at its most challenging. And as I feel pressured by myself to write, to finish, to not miss an opportunity by delaying any further, I must consciously remind myself to stop and wake up. Look around. Look at the beauty here, even in pain and imperfection. Take a moment to process it. Then I can write about the world, and maybe I'll be able to do it some justice.

To my fellow writers, dreamers, family and friends: don't forget to be aware. As we write and live out our dreams, our fantasies, and our own unique versions of reality, we must remember to pop our heads above water for a look around and a gulp of air. Our world is, after all, where we draw our inspiration to create in the first place.

Announcing a new short story: The Boat by Elle Otero

Exciting news!! For those of you anxious to get reading, The Boat is launching on November 14th. Get ready for an apocalyptic short story that sets the stage for the Efrenen Sea series:

When her lover succumbs to the virus plaguing the remains of the civilized world, Lindsay is left alone on a sailboat she can't operate. With nuclear bombs deployed to destroy the infected and the storm season just beginning, she must find a way to survive—without losing her mind in the process.

Solitude, saltwater, and survival. There's no better way to get ready for Out of the Efrenen Sea than by reading The Boat!

Available for pre-order on Kindle now!

“It was clear then, as the rolling motion of the cabin grew more sudden and violent, that there was nothing she could do to change it. If it killed her, that was it. She was powerless to stop it. A calm came over her and she surrendered to it, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. Death couldn’t be any worse than this mode of existence.
The boat jumped and her eyes opened. No, she wanted to live.”

— The Boat