Rising Storm Tales

Everyone must

2011-06-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

" 'Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die... It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.' "

Ray Bradbury wrote this in Fahrenheit 451, which I just finished reading. If ever you doubt what the purpose of all this toil is (I know I have), or find yourself wondering whether it will ever be worth it (I know I do), then read that book. It has forced me to re-think why we do it, and why it is important.

Because the books, the stories, they are important. Even if they're just meant to be fluff, or a fine and rousing adventure, a legend, nothing to be taken seriously... it's still important. They are a part of you, and they are important.

The Creative Collective

2011-04-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, when I was young and silly, I believed that to be a good writer, your imagination would need to be full and brilliant enough that you never needed creative input from another. I thought that to need assistance with your own work from someone else meant that it would no longer be truly yours.

What I have since learned is that the best works are never solely the creation of the person whose name is on the "By..." note.

Creativity, to me, is a like an energy force that all people can tap into with varying degrees of regularity and success. It's the true magic that exists in this world, and we all have a connection to it. However, what each person does or sees or builds or dreams with it is completely different. We are all limited by what we can take in at any given moment. This is why getting and giving input with other creative people is nothing to be shunned.

Art and I have been blessed with a particularly incredible source of feedback from one of our best friends. To my knowledge he has never written anything himself, but he has read a lot of stuff. Plus, he is intelligent enough to understand what elements makes stories good and why. During some of our brainstorming sessions, I recall being happy with his input as well as a little concerned about how our story would have turned out without it. But since then, I've learned not to worry so much and instead just be grateful. Besides, creative people tend to act like magnets to each other.

If you are like I was and worried about the "purity" of your creative works, remember that no creative work is pure by default. We all derive inspiration by previous works or merely by what we see around us. Nothing is created in a vacuum. And sometimes, a single work is simply too big for one person to create on their own. Just look at the Making Of features of any movie and marvel at the number of people needed to build just a single sequence, the number of differing elements that most of us rarely even think about coming together to make that moment.

So we now know that listening to other creative people is of benefit. That doesn't mean every piece of feedback and every idea someone throws at your project is a good one. Think of yourself as the captain of a ship. Different people with specialized duties and fields of expertise can all contribute to making the ship sail, but only you decide where the ship will go and how it will get there.

Sometimes there's a lot of decision-making that goes into the process of writing. And I think that it's the strength of your decision-making, rather than the size of your imagination, that really makes you a writer.

Rejuvenation

2011-04-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

A good fellow writer-friend of ours has had a spot of fortune. He completed his second manuscript a while back, and it is now in the hands of not one but two prospective literary agencies. He's been at this for longer than Art and I, and has helped and supported us many times over the years in our own writing. Praying and keeping our fingers crossed that this will be his break.

I myself reached a satisfying personal milestone. As often happens when one lingers in a place for long, clutter accumulates. Eventually it bogs down your creative senses. Well now, clutter is no more! I was astonished by the difference I felt almost immediately, not realizing how weighed down I was by all the junk. The experience taught me that we, as writers, should be mindful of how our environment can affect us. We have much within us to nurture and care for, and to do our art justice we should maintain our emotional health as much as our physical and mental health.

2011-03-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

Greetings, folks. I realize how long this blog has been inactive, and my apologies to our friends who had been keeping up with it. The last several months have been depressingly dry of writing activity and instead full of questions and reevaluations. It hasn't been an easy time, but then such periods can be rewarding in other ways.

Before anyone gets concerned, no, Art and I are not giving up the writing business. We've got too many great things planned, with more being added to the list every day, to consider just stopping. It's too much a part of us. No, for me, I've been rethinking why I want to do this... why it's a part of me.

Fifth grade. That's really when it dates back to. Doing creative writing assignments was nothing new, and they could be fun and all, but I never thought about doing any writing on my own. Then we were asked to write our own mystery story, and I'm not sure what happened to me. I got an idea right away, an idea that I was so excited about that I spent every free moment of time working on it.

We were supposed to read them in front of the class on their due date. I was a little embarrassed by that point, because mine ended up being the longest written by far, but still I was proud of it. I still remember some of the looks I got from my classmates as I went back to my seat: they were astonished that such a thing could have come from me. I was one of those in-between kids, not belonging to any particular clique or social group but with friends or acquaintences in most of them. Those kids, by nature, actively avoid labels and try not to distinguish themselves. That moment, when I went back to my seat with smiles and whispered congratulations following in my wake, was the first time I had ever felt noticed. And it felt good.

Of course, once you do get noticed, then you get labeled. I was labeled the Writer. Not that I minded at first. I felt like I had found my calling in life, something I could enjoy fully while being good at it, and for the first time I had a definitive answer whenever someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. But then I made a mistake.

Self-esteem is a hard thing to manage, and I've always been pretty bad at it. My identity became bound up in writing. People expected great things from my creativity, and I couldn't stand the idea of disappointing them. It became a one-sided competition; my work needed to be the best, because I was the Writer, and without that I would go back to being nothing. Somewhere towards the end of high school, when the pressure I was putting on myself became too great, I declared myself hopeless and talentless and gave up my dream.

Why the history lesson? Because even though I have rededicated myself to writing, that bad habit hasn't gone away yet. I love writing, but I still get an added thrill when someone smiles and praises my work, and I remember what it's like to feel noticed and special. And always lurking in the dark of that... the feeling of dejection when something isn't praised, doesn't feel the best. And that's what I've been struggling with these last several months.

Poor Art... he offers me encouragement and chides me on my silliness when appropriate. But he can't do the heavy lifting for me. All he can do is wait at the top of the cliff while I struggle pulling myself up the rope.

No writing is perfect, because no writer is perfect. We all wrestle with our own shortcomings. And the question at the end always remains the same: where do you go from here? I close these thoughts with no answer. Rather, I will let the productivity or lack thereof in the coming months speak for me.

Memories of the past, ideas for the future

2010-09-11T12:56:00.001-07:00

Today I was recalling a subject one of my best friends in high school and I liked to have, especially after English courses when we were studying some of the "great" writers of the world. I use the parenthesis there not as mockery or to imply that these writers weren't great, but to demonstrate how different the impressions can be for people who are not writers.

Scholars and academics love to speculate and hypothesize what the great writers of the past were really saying in their writings. All of the hidden meanings and symbolism and allegory. There is a wealth of collected knowledge on these subjects, and then every couple of years or so, someone else will come up with a totally different theory that is supposed to send an earthquake of revelation through this branch of study.

My friend and I theorized that sometimes it's hard to pin down what these writers "actually" meant was because they weren't really trying to say anything.

Both of us were prolific writers throughout our school days, and we noticed that sometimes, when we showed our work to others, they would comment on how they loved this symbolism and that hidden message... only, we had written those words without any thought to symbolism at all! Oftentimes it would make sense how they would come to that impression, so it would turn into a kind of happy accident. It made us think, though. If our own amateur work could be re-interpreted, or in some cases misinterpreted, couldn't this have happened to those great writers of our past?

You see where the parenthesis comes in now. I do believe that these writers were great, but not necessarily for the reasons the academics like to tout. Sometimes writers just need to write. It's how we deal with the backlogs of emotions or thoughts or impressions that arise in human life. And sometimes in those times we will write without giving any real deep thought to what we are writing about. What words we chose to put to paper can be explained so easily as "because it sounded cool at the time."

So is it a bad thing to speculate about what a writer "meant"? Hardly. That's like saying it's bad to have an opinion. I would just caution people to be prepared for their opinion to be completely wrong.

And as a writer, I think it's awesome when readers take away things that I hadn't intentionally put in the material. That means they make it their own. But it is going to make me giggle if people start spouting off their impressions of my work as if it's gospel truth.

My personal advice to the writers out there is be prepared for people to forge their own opinions about your work. Strooooong opinions. Wrong opinions. Correct them when you feel it's necessary, but try to keep it respectful and don't take it personally. Maybe that's just their way of dealing with the emotions of life too.

Moving along

2010-09-07T14:55:00.000-07:00

Two rejections so far from our current batch of queries, with the rest still pending. It's a busy time for agents, it seems. A lot of them are coming back from book fairs and conventions and trying to work on their query backlog... which, if you're a prolific agent, can pile up very quickly. Definitely need to give props again to our friend Eric for introducing us to Querytracker.

Work on the new project continues apace. We will be getting the scene plotting done this week, and once that is complete, work on the first drafts and new beta packs will begin. Already people have been asking for them, which makes me happy even as I feel slightly guilty that they're a little behind schedule. Art and I are very lucky to have so many wonderful people rooting for us and helping us out.

Thoughts on querying

2010-08-29T13:26:00.001-07:00

The first batch of new queries is underway. Keeping our fingers crossed and preparing the next batch if these come back with rejections. I was tempted to say "when"... but let's not be so negative! You never know what's waiting for you after that first or 500th query.

The querying process is actually kind of fun for me. If you're doing it right, then it's time-consuming, because each agent is unique with different requirements, and each one merits a custom query letter. And there's always a thrill you get when firing off that finished email or dropping the envelope in the mailbox. "Could this be the one?" you silently ask yourself. "Will it soon be time to move on to the next phase of my career?"

Just never forget that your career, at the heart, is always to write. So keep writing. Don't let your creativity dry up from anxiety as you hover by your mailbox or spasmatically refresh your email. After all, you never know what inspiration will bring either, or where it will strike, so you have to do your best to always be ready for it.

Long months of silence

2010-08-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

If anyone out there is actually still reading this... no, it is most certainly not dead! It just slipped into a period of hibernation while life interrupted the delicate creative process.

To keep the story short and simple, day jobs were shuffled around, new housing arrangements were made, and now Art and I are back to working on our passions. The latest revision pass on the current manuscript is complete, and the hunt for the ever-elusive literary agent begins again in earnest. Thanks to another up-and-coming writer friend of ours, we have even more prospects to submit our queries to. We'll be sure to keep things up-to-date on that end.

We shall also begin work a new project very soon. Though all of our work is dear to our hearts, this one has been sitting in the background for far too long. It is the first story concept Art and I created together, back before we were even dating. Look for more info on the progress of the first book in our new sci-fi series, here and on the Rising Storm Tales website.

Man, it feels good to be back to work!

Attack the silence

2010-03-28T11:07:00.001-07:00

The goal of any life, no matter what vocation, should be one of balance.

The past few weeks have been filled with busy, non-writing, somewhat stressful ish. When that happens, it throws my center of balance to the cranky side, and I start bemoaning that I have just have "no time" for writing and creativity.

No time. Is that ever really true?

Sponteanious creativity happens for me in the in-between moments. In the shower or bathroom as I'm getting ready for work, on a walk outside to the mailbox at the corner, on a late-night snack run to 7-11. Character concepts, scene ideas, dialogue... they just sort of happen, as though I've stumbled into the middle of someone else's thoughts. And it occurs frequently enough that oftentimes I don't realize that I'm being creative. It's been a part of my everyday life for years now.

The stumbling block for me personally is when I keep all of these thoughts in my brain and don't write them down.

After all, writing takes time, and I'm too busy, too much other stuff to do...

When I don't write, it creates a void of silence, like a black hole that sucks everything toward it, until it plugs up my stress drains. I start feeling hollow and pissy and stuck. Internal tension rises over the littlest things, and life in general starts looking gray. All in all, not a fun place to be.

It's an easy trap to fall into, feeling stuck, out of control. But it really is just a trap. A construct, a prison of our own making. We're humans. If you think about it, "impossible" doesn't really exist for us. If there's something we really want, then we find a way to get it. The only thing that can really stand in our way is ourselves, and that's kind of a thrilling thing.

There will be much to do, come Monday. A lot of things are going on, and sooner or later it'll all need to be dealt with. But I'm not stuck. I never was. So I can take the time to write down my crazy thoughts, file them away for better use later, and feel better for keeping my internal life in balance.

Webvella worlds

2010-03-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

Of all the content on the site so far, I think the webvellas have been the most enjoyable. It's an interesting excerise, creating short stories this way. At first Art and I took something of a role-play approach, and actually this first webvella was taken from an RP message board we started some three years ago and never got farther than the fifth post! But the characters were fun, so I'm glad they've finally found a home. We've moved away from the roleplay method since the webvella started, and I think we've managed to hit upon something unique for a writers' website. Almost like a written online comic, we wanted to give the viewers something fun that updated fairly frequently, little snippets of worlds spilling off from the large ones already being molded in our heads.

It's also a nice exercise for us. We're in between novel work at the moment, so having a chance to do a little bit of writing every day keeps us in practice. And since the installments are short, there's less stress and plenty of time to discuss between us how things should go. And who knows? Characters and new novel plots have a way of spawning from projects like these.

It's times like these that I wish I had taught myself how to draw already. I'd love to do some illustrations, especially for some of the future webvellas we already have cooking. Ah well... there's still time to learn, when there's a few less distractions about.

To Feel Not Good Enough

2010-03-10T22:22:00.000-08:00

Unless they're an egotist, at some point every person feels inadequate and ill-prepared for what they're trying to accomplish. Some get discouraged and give up their goals completely. Others may try to forge ahead, but are so insecure about their work that they stress themselves out and become incapable of enjoying something they once loved doing.

This topic of conversation came up between Art and I shortly after the website went live, and it seemed like an appropriate idea to explore here.

As writers, how do we know that we will get published? How do we know we're really good enough to make it in this industry? How do we know that people will like our stories? How do we know...

Art and I came to the conclusion that that's the wrong question writers should be asking themselves.

How do you know people will like your stuff? Uh, you don't. Not until you show it to someone, then they'll tell you what they think. But before then? Don't worry about before then. In fact, don't worry about after then either. Say the first person you show your work to just doesn't like it, that it's just not their thing. That's okay! Show it to another person, see what their take on it is.

Perhaps the better question to ask would be... do you believe in yourself, in your work? Take out the idea of getting published for now, just concentrate on what you believe about yourself, right now. Do you write because you love writing? Because you have something to say and to share with the world? Because you enjoy good stories and fun characters?

Do you believe your voice should be heard?

I think that until the answer is "yes", then you shouldn't even be thinking about getting published. Focus on getting to know your voice and being comfortable with yourself first. If you don't believe in what you're doing, then why should anyone else give you a chance? There are many people out there, and they simply love what they're doing, and they're all vying for a shot to let their voices be heard.

If I was making the decisions on the other end, I'd choose someone who believes in themself first too.

Disappointment and discouragement hits us all. We're human, comes with the territory. Art and I don't know if and when we'll sell our first book. We believe strongly that we will, and other folks have told us that we have what it takes... but we don't know. We won't until it happens.

And if it doesn't happen, that's no excuse for us to stop writing. It's just too much fun! And there are too many stories to share. So even if no one decides to pay us to write these things full-time, that's okay, we'll figure out some way to get them to the people who would like to see them.

After all, the idea of needing to be "good enough" is a big load of bologna anyway. This is art! There's no singular "good enough" path to be found. It's a big world out there. If you write something that you love, chances are pretty high that someone is going to love it just as much as you, maybe even more.

To do what you love is the only qualification you need.

First!

2010-03-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

Now that Art and I have figured out a bit more of this whole site management thing, it's time to get the really real blog up and running.

This will be the place to go for updates on the Great Agent Hunt, reports on current works-in-progress, and general thoughts on...well...pretty much anything relating to the writing life. If you want to keep tabs on us, this will be your first place to check, followed closely by the site forum. (There, all you stalkers out there, I just made things easy for you! *grin*)

Got to admit, we're pretty excited about this whole thing, and maybe just a little bit nervous too. We're used to being hermits. Now we're creating our own web presence where anyone, not just our beloved circle of friends and family, can peek in on us at any time. But we welcome all you peekers! Whether you're a fellow writer, a fan of fantasy and sci-fi stories, or an aspiring writer trying to find others struggling in the trenches just like you, welcome!