Things I thought about writing while mixing my metaphors.

"November is usually such a disagreeable month... as if the year had suddenly found out that she was growing old and could do nothing but weep and fret over it."

-L.M Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

It’s the beginning of November and I’m watching the snow falling on the roof of my garage and undoubtedly covering the gardenia plant that I nursed all through Canadian summer to the production of a solitary bud that has yet to open. I’ve given up hope that it will ever bloom and release the sweet, intoxicating scent known to that temperamental shrub that blesses gardening zones that fall in the double-digits. Really, I am amazed it has lasted this long, albeit abetted somewhat by my schlepping it into the garage late at night when the mercury is predicted to drop. I’m done with that, though. Time to let go and let God, as it were. There are some things that you cling to in October, that November buries at long last.  

October is a month of nostalgia. Even writing out the word, I remember the almost lost days of elementary school and writing out the date on the top right hand corner of my notebook page in the large, looping hand of my childhood penmanship. October lent itself to illumination. Pumpkins. Leaves. Black cats and jellyfish-shaped ghosts flitted around the dates that marked my education. It is a month that keeps giving. Thanksgiving and Halloween and warm sunshine with crisp apple cider scented wind as the unharvested crab apple crop softens on the branches of gnarled and naked trees and perfumes the air before splattering on the ground below. They’re mess makers, those trees, but forgiven once again come May when they adorn themselves in a luxurious display of blossoms.

But May is still a long way off, yet. There’s November to get through. November with its grey skies and flurries. Its blankets of snow that deflate into grey slush and tire tracks and melting footprints on sidewalks. November with its biting winds and hitched up shoulders. It’s easy to lose hope in November. It is easy to feel like I’ve gotten jammed up, somehow frozen in place and waiting for the sun come near enough to warm me back to life so that the sap runs again. November feels like going to bed and being tortured yet again by the thought that nothing happened today—just like yesterday. If the Christmas season didn’t follow on this clinical depression of a month, I’m not sure any of us would make it. I turned on my Christmas playlist this afternoon in an effort to keep the grey at bay. As though I were one of the little animals turned to stone in C.S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe celebrating the return of Father Christmas to the land of perpetual winter. That is the astounding thing about stories, they tap into something real and primal—feelings that you didn’t know you had until something in your chest echoed back with perfect pitch the truth revealed in a story. Winter without Christmas—without celebration—is November. Process without the anticipation of hope is a sick land under a spell. The always winter, never Christmas of Narnia, is me if I turn my heart to stone;— incapable or unwilling to celebrate the goodness of God that is coming; indeed, that is already here. 

‘Aslan is on the move’ was the whispered hope of frozen Narnia. Despite the fact that nothing has melted yet, and the world looks as frozen and hopeless as it did yesterday, Aslan is on the move. Thank God for C.S Lewis and the truth of Narnia. A fantasy story about children and talking animals and a white witch who tells you what you want to hear in order to ensnare you into betraying that which is most dear; and the wonderful Lion who isn’t safe, but is good.

Writing that doesn’t reveal the truth is selling something. Perhaps unintentionally, but selling something, nonetheless, even if it is just an interpretation of the world. If it isn’t true down deep, it’s marketing. It’s despair or folly with a clickbait title—it’s the White Witch telling you what you want to hear in order to get something from you.

There are times when the truth is easy to see,—like the yellow brick road that Dorothy followed to reach the Emerald City and find the Wizard of Oz—it is a pathway laid clearly before our feet. And yet, there are other times, too; like the field of soporific poppies where the truth you want to walk on is a hidden thing and the very air itself an opium haze meant to lull you to a death like sleep. 

The truth—that golden path— desperately needed, desperately sought, but hidden amid the snares laid by a different witch. Funny isn’t it, that we expect the truth to lead us somewhere? The questions posed by the longing in our lives are waypoints on a map whose destination in marked with a cross. But no matter how long we’ve been searching and waiting and bearing up, the answers to the urgent feeling of longing within elude us. 

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search it out.” (Proverbs 25:2)

Strange to think that God has deliberately hidden things from us in order that we might discover nobility in searching the answers out. Writing is a means of searching. Flannery O’Conner once said that she wrote in order to discover what she was doing. Andrew Klavan, another author I admire, said he wrote fiction in order to work out his worldview and I find myself doing the same. There are places that I keep coming back to; ideas and ideals that become inevitable plot points or character traits because they mean something—profound or precious—to me. In every piece of writing, I see the themes emerging like a polaroid photo that gradually reveals a familiar face. At first they are only off-colour, misshapen unrecognizable blobs, but gradually as the the whole takes shape, the ideals come into focus. The ideas that are powerful to me both for good and ill are already present even in the execrable first drafts. They are in the DNA just waiting to be expressed. The problems that I don’t know the answers to; the truth that I am hungry to find. 

Someone asked me recently if I knew the ending of my novel Altruism in Gophers before I started writing it. My answer felt too close. I said I knew where I wanted to go, but I didn’t know how to get there. I could have been talking about myself, rather than the story. How can I as an author answer the questions posed by the characters and the plot when I don’t know the answers myself? 

Writing—for me—takes a very long time. Months go by without much measurable progress, except perhaps for the savage editing of great swaths of text, and a particular brand of self-loathing that I can’t get where I want to go. Providence and serendipity have to play their parts in fiction and in life—but not so heavy-handedly or the reader rolls her eyes at authorial convenience that cannot get within spitting distance of the truth. And yet, I am desperate for serendipity; for Providence to step in with a deus ex machina; lest I sink like Atreyu’s horse Artax into the Swamp of Sadness in The Neverending Story. The search for the truth of the matter is exhausting and costly. Perhaps only kings can afford it—or maybe it is the quest itself that makes a king.

Writing is a strange pilgrimage of discovery and creation. We write and fail and try again. Columbus set out on his voyage in order to find a new trade route to India and discovered North America instead. Sometimes—usually—the answer is different than what we expect. And usually, the search takes much longer than you ever thought possible when you started out: this searching for what God only knows. And it feels like the answers will be out of my grasp forever. But—I remind myself when I feel melancholy and in danger of writing a depressing poem—it’s just November and Christmastide is coming.

Why the Second Book Often Sucks

So--my book is out there. You might have noticed all my shameless self-promotion of late. (Altruism in Gophers now available on all Amazon marketplaces!) And while I've stepped into a bewildering new world in terms of marketing and independently publishing, I've also come to the end of a project. Something that only existed in my mind for several years is now a real book that anyone can buy.

Before you have anything published, whenever someone asks you what you're working on, it feels like you're describing a personal game of Pretend. You feel like a phoney playing at being a writer. And, it's easy to see why, really. Your mind is populated with imaginary people in pretend scenarios. Everything is made up.  Everything is happening in your mind alone until it ends up in a document on your computer that no one is reading but you. It's basically a given that you're going to crave a little outside validation every now and then.

If I'm telling the truth, which bourbon and late night blogging seem to spur, I might as well admit that I didn't want to go this way. I wanted to write a novel, submit it to a literary agent or twelve, get picked up by some kindred spirit type who would shop it around to the editors they knew at the big publishing houses while I plunked away on another story. Sooner or later, I'd get a congratulatory phone call and a paycheque and eventually I'd see my book stacked up on the tables at Costco when shopping in bulk for things I never knew I needed. That's how I wanted it to go. My dreams are small(ish).

That's not how it went.

While I personally prefer stories with satisfying resolutions, so far my own saga is more like a European art flick where nothing much ever happens, but damn, that main character is maddeningly compelling. (Actually, I don't watch those kinds of movies. I've moved into a purely escapist Action Adventure viewing era. I'm very happy here.)

What did happen was that I got ignored and rejected. At first it rocked my confidence, especially in light of the unimpressive fare that gets peddled as worthwhile reading these days. Then, the process made me cynical about the market and the gatekeepers of the industry who I couldn't respect but who had jobs and paycheques and bios on websites that other people managed for them. A lot of these industry professionals had blogs with advice to give. I read them and wondered if they realized how much they seemed to speak out of both sides of their mouths with conflicting advice.  The pathway to publishing a novel is like finding your way through a corn maze in the fog at night time with disembodied voices yelling advice at you like the audience on The Price is Right. Who are these people and how good is their advice?

"Write what you know," is the the most ubiquitous writing advice you'll come across. And yet, does J.K Rowling really know what it is like to be an orphaned wizard with a destiny? Are the writers of mysteries constantly encountering murders in real life and solving them? Did J.R.R Tolkien know the burden of the One Ring? Did Pat Conroy really have such a difficult and complex relationship with his father--? ...Never mind.

My point is, what good is telling me to  write what I know, if the market and its gatekeepers are actively looking for something else?  For a while it seemed that the book industry pros were clamouring for teenage paranormal love stories, ("not vampires though, so overdone"). Then, they all wanted dystopians possibly about you know, maybe some games where children are forced to fight to the death to avoid starvation, ("but with compelling characters with original voices in unique scenarios...").  Now, it's all gender-bending protagonists and resisting in the Age of Trump.

It's hard to catch a trend--; even if you want to.

And yet, all that to say that despite my burgeoning cynicism about the industry professionals and their opinions, I never wanted to self-publish. I didn't want to do it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I wanted someone who knew the standard of good writing and storytelling to tell me that I was meeting it. And secondly, having to market and distribute my book all by myself freaked me the hell out.

It still does. But here I am. And this level of the maze is just as confusing as the last. I think the reason that I prefer action movies to most other genres is that there is an expectation of narrative resolution somewhere around the two hour mark. Not so, in life. I've written a book. I've edited, formatted and published said book. (Altruism in Gophers! Buy it here!) But the resolution still hasn't arrived because while the project is creatively complete, I've got bills to pay and marketing is another animal entirely. Writers can blather on about writing for themselves--which is creatively necessary--but they still have to teeter between artistically beneficial and commercially viable. Do I cynically undertake to write the next paranormal gender fluid protagonist resisting a supposed tyrant in a dystopian world of gladiatorial matches where all the bad guys wear red ball caps? Or do I write what I'm actually interested in? It's a lot of pressure and I think it may be why sometimes an author's second book often doesn't live up to the vibrancy or quality of the first. The pressure is real. How to make a living. How to connect your work with the people who will enjoy it. And, what to write next that will satisfy all of these requirements?

(Art by Cody Andreasen)

I often say that I'd be willing to sell out if someone was willing to buy. I'm mostly joking. Especially in light of the fact that the one story I've written that never received even a single rejection and was accepted within a day or two of sending it was The Energy Trader.  I cynically included every single detail mentioned in the call for submissions and dashed off the script in a matter of hours. I created an absurd superhero story meant to lampoon the whole notion that stories and characters had to meet the parameters of identity politics. But turns out, since it technically checked all of the boxes, nobody seemed to notice it was a satire.

I guess there is something to be said for selling out.