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Journal Entry: October 5, 2006

There are two ways to stop writing a story.

Wait, before I get into that, I’ve reminded myself of something else.

Ah, haha.

No, seriously, the something else: there are two ways to end a story when you, as the writer, completely give up on finishing it. You can either kill off all the characters (or enough of them as to resolve the plot, by way of its invested characters being dead), or you can have someone wake up, and it was all just a dream.

Immature writers think these things are clever. They are not. They occur to all writers, and are a way of getting out of doing the hard work. It’s not hard to write the beginning of a story. It’s not hard to write the middle. It is remarkably hard to write the end. It’s like a sonic boom, if I remember my physics correctly.

(What am I, a Science teacher? Figure it out for yourself.)

That discussion could legitimately fall under the “two ways to stop writing a story” heading, but it’s not what I’d intended. What I mean is, (1) you can burn out on a story by losing interest, or having insufficient energy to push through that barrier and get to the end or (2) you can get distracted by some other project, that draws your attention and energy away from the unfinished work.

I don’t think I’ve ever done (1). That’s what most people call writer’s block. Well, no, that’s what most writers call writer’s block. Everybody else has some strange concept of writer’s block that, honestly, just isn’t relevant.

I’m really bad about (2), though (as you all well know). I don’t let it worry me too much, because I’m young. And because, for the most part, the new project I move on to is generally of at least as high a value as the old one was. I’ve described my writing process here before. I take long breaks, and the project almost always benefits from them.

The problem is…if I die tomorrow, I’ll only have one whole story told. Two, if anyone can dig out a copy of The Poet Alexander. I hate that. I want to think of myself as a novelist, but with all the time I’ve put into it, I’ve only completed two things, and both of them terrible.

Anyway, obviously this has something to do with Sleeping Kings. I am working on it again. Some, a little bit. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to push through the pile of pages, near the end. I’m working on it, though. I’m also becoming diverted more and more, though, by old projects set aside. I came up with a fantastic idea for King Jason’s War the other day, and I’m just itching to write enough of that story that I can use the idea. Incidentally, that’s another story that I set aside around 70%, in the way I’m discussing. Not because I didn’t care anymore, but because I cared about other things that drew me away. It’s a good story, though, and I’d love to get it finished.

I’ve been thinking about my sci-fi stuff, too. Most of you know this story, but shortly after I moved to Tulsa I won a writing contest on the forums of a sci-fi game that was in-development, called Eschaton. The prize for winning the contest was a job as the storyline writer for the game. I was pretty excited.

They never got any backers, though, and after three years of not hearing much from them, the game folded. I asked them for permission to go ahead and write and publish stories set in their universe (on the assumption that any obscene profits I made would eventually translate into them getting their game published), and they were generous enough (or so broken-down) to give me that permission.

It’s a neat universe. They provided me with some basic conceits and general elements, the names of the three major factions and their relationships, and then gave me free reign. In the time I was writing for them, I developed an immense amount of backstory (most of which never even got posted to their website), as well as a “present day” (within the context of the game) storyline concerning goings on in the universe at large.

I might post some clips here, or even make another blog for them, a la Sleeping Kings. We’ll see. Anyway, I find it interesting how much my interest has returned to writing in the last year, so that even when I waver (with the exception of that brief tryst with my programming project), I waver toward other good writing.

Wish me luck. I want to finish Sleeping Kings. I want to finish King Jason’s War. I want to write The Necessary Lie (my first Eschaton book), and probably the vampire book, too. It should be fun. I’ll try to find good ways to share it all with you.

Which reminds me: wasn’t I going to design and maintain a webpage? Ugh. So much to do….

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Greatness: Heart’s Desire

There’s a verse in the Psalms that took me by surprise, first time I read it.

“Delight yourself in the Lord; and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

That’s Psalm 37:4. It’s in a familiar vein, “Ask and you shall receive,” and the kid asking his father for a loaf of bread, and even the insistent widow. That’s all Jesus, though, right? I mean, he was a generous guy. It struck me, though, reading the psalmist saying the same sort of thing….

Prayer is a serious thing, in the Bible. It’s a powerful thing. We are encouraged and ordered to use it. And not just for meditation, not just as an opportunity to spread our lives before God, and hopefully gain a new perspective. We are directly instructed to ask for what we want, because God wants to be our provider. He makes that clear, again and again. Look what he was trying to do in Eden.

That Psalm caught my attention when I was a boy, back when I was about sixteen, and I put it to the test. I felt confident in that time, because I did delight in the Lord, I was certain of that, and more importantly, I knew without a doubt the desire of my heart. And I didn’t have it.

So I prayed. I prayed, and in the night I had a dream, a glimpse of the life I wanted to have, years off, and that was enough for me. I took confidence from that moment, and I received what I asked for then.

That was a powerful experience for me.

A prayer isn’t a birthday cake wish, y’know? I don’t think it needs to be a secret. Sitting in church last Sunday, the man was saying this or that about relying on God, about letting him exercise his power within your life. That’s something I believe in, as all of you know. I believe the world is a malleable thing, that reality can be bent for the purposes of God or man. I nodded, understanding and encouraged, even, and suddenly I remembered high school, and that desperate prayer….

I have a heart’s desire, in my life today. I have lots of things to ask for (and hope that they will be given). We have a baby on the way, and I want her to be healthy. I want Trish to be healthy through it all, and I worry about that. I want lots of little things, the comforts that require wealth beyond what I already have. I pray a lot. I ask for a lot. But those are just things. Somehow, in my head at least, I’ve separated such prayers, such petitions, from the sort of desire the psalmist was talking about.

My heart’s desire, today and now, is to be a best-selling writer. I want to publish a work, and have it read by the world. I want to write, stories and lessons and snapshots, to show readers what the world was and is and could be. I want my name to be remembered, for the words that I said. I have a message that I want heard, I have talents, gifts, that I want to use. I want the money. Not that — I want the opportunity. I want my writing to be my life.

I was an A student in elementary school. I was good at everything except multiplication. I could teach myself, given the right books, and I usually managed to get them. I had a lot of plans for the future. For most of my childhood, they had nothing to do with writing.

A lot of you have known me for a long time, but if you haven’t heard me tell this story, you don’t know this story. That is to say, most of you know me as a writer, but none of you were there, at the crucial moment, when I discovered why I was a writer. Maybe Josh, but no one else.

I was maybe twelve. Probably eleven. We’d had a handful of writing projects over the last year, and I’d done well enough on them (but, then, I did well on all of my projects, as long as they weren’t based on multiplication). One day I was thinking through the writing process, though. The actual job description, of the sort of person who writes stories, and I realized it would be a home job. Maybe a nice office, maybe just a pad of paper on the kitchen table, but it would be a home job.

I wanted that, because I wanted to be home for my kids. I wanted to be home with my family, even when I was working. That picture stuck in my head, and I’ve never shaken it. Even times when I was certain I didn’t want kids, it was mostly because of some variation of the disappointment at realizing I wouldn’t be able to realize that picture.

I was twelve. That’s how I thought when I was twelve. Yeesh.

That’s my heart’s desire. I have a great job now, a fantastic one, that pays well and demands nothing of me but those things at which I excel, those things I can do easily and quickly and well. Given some of the things that have been discussed recently, it could get even better. And it’s a better job than I deserve, considering the effort I’ve put into it. I chalk that up to a blessing, a gift. I’m in no position to complain, and I realize that.

But my heart’s desire is to be a writer, just a writer, completely a writer, for my family. That last bit matters, too. I could have been a starving artist. I could have refused to take a job, and chased after every avenue available to me to get a book sold (in a market that is incredibly difficult to get a foot in the door), but it’s about more than that to me. That’s why I described my picture, my goal when I was twelve. I want it for my family, not in spite of my family. I want something better than I deserve to have, something I maybe had a shot at in the past, but I’ve squandered my opportunities. I want something that would completely change my life. I want it as a gift, served up on a silver platter.

Why not? It’s happened before.

I do delight in the Lord. Maybe not as loudly as I did back then. Certainly not as dogmatically. But I do. And I crave this, looking through the few short days between now and then, I want this very much. Please, let it be so. Amen.

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The King, to the Poet (A Poem)

The King, to the Poet

Something happened, when no one was looking.
Quietly, politely, we tore it all down–
Ages old, majestic and mighty, we tore it down to build something new.

Shiny and new.

It was a tapestry once, that told a story around which we built our lives.
It was a mighty whole, a single fabric, built of myriad mysterious pieces.

With the blessing of all (or all but the fringe) we took it apart.

We took the shiny pieces and the pretty pieces and the useful pieces
And put them to work,
Doing our bidding (we once did its), and serving us in strength.

We marvel then at what our lives have become,
All built of artificial fibers and synthetic materials.
Appropriated. Misused.

And what of that old rag, that ancient tapestry?
It’s tatters now, of course, torn to shreds and threadbare
All that’s left behind.

And those same who plundered it now mock it for all the things it lacks.
For all the holes, for all the inconsistencies and flaws–
For gaps, that they had made.

There are gaps, and holes. Places where things once were,
Where things shiny and things pretty and things useful used to be.
It’s not the rag that’s torn, though.

The single piece is shattered, scattered, but its fragments still as strong.
Alas, they no longer grow as one.

You see, it was a living thing. It breathed the life of man.
We killed it, for our own ends — butchered it, for our wealth.
We took its intellect, to make us wise.
We took its heart, to learn some sort of kindness.
We took its soul, to give us more than life.
We took its might, its powers, its strength to change the world, and we made the world we wanted.

We still have all the pieces, and look how much they change our lives.
We killed the thing to get them, though.

We could start anew, of course. Some have tried.
We could make a new fabric, and start the ages-long process of giving it life,
Weave in the first of many threads, and make a gift to our descendants.
We’re a world of scavengers, though.
We’ve made our lives out of plundered parts now, and we’re not about to stop.

Start another if you want. It can be done.
But I’ll tell you this, my prophecy and sigh:
They’ll watch,
And they’ll point and laugh,
They’ll criticize everything that is not what the old thing was.

Then they’ll take everything that’s good, and mock you all the more.

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Journal Entry: July 17, 2006

1,000 words a day is taxing.

Hmm…that doesn’t quite say it strongly enough. I could just add profanity to spice things up, but instead I’ll go into a boring level of detail. I am a true protestant.

See, okay, if I sit down and write a 1,000 word story (or essay), then I’d guess that, if I have a general idea ahead of time, it’s going to take about four hours. I can compose and type up 1,000 words in about forty minutes. I’ve found that to be a pretty solid estimate over the course of the last several weeks.

But it takes time to create. It takes time to build the story pieces, and lay them out in order, and fill in the background, and (my method, at least), I put all those pieces together before I sit down to write.

Now, when it comes to Sleeping Kings, I’d say I spend about eight hours per 1,000 word story. Y’know when you’re talking to me on the phone, or in-game, or even in person, and you tell me something really interesting, and I say, “Yeah. Hey, what did you think about Josh stabbing the Queen Mum?” or something like that. That’s not precisely because I think your story is boring.

It’s that I’m obsessing over Sleeping Kings. I’d feel bad about it, but everyone who’s actually reading it is pretty excited about it, so I don’t.

Hmm, none of that is really new info. Something that is, though: I’ve posted a story daily now since May 25th. That’s 1,000 words (production) every day for fifty-four days. Yeah, Saturday’s was only on Saturday by about five minutes. That’s actually what got me thinking about this.

I have never written daily. Never. I’ve heard that all writers write daily. I got pretty close in college, taking Creative Writing every semester, and making time in my time-rich schedule to write. But even then I didn’t do weekends, and only very rarely was a day’s writing actually production. Most of the time it was notes, or test material, or even just daydreaming, composing, without any words on paper.

One of my goals, back then, was 1,000 words on paper, every weekday. I know for a fact I never hit it, even for two weeks at a time. Closest I came was when I was rewriting Taming Fire, and I’d get on a tear and do four or five chapters at once. But I wouldn’t even count that. That’s rewrite, not original production.

Of course, as most of you know, I got worse, not better. The whole time I was in Tulsa, I never wrote anything close to a schedule. I’d get the fever for one project or another, and work on that project (and rarely finish), but I never wrote to the calendar.

I’m there, now. Want to know something sad? I think it’s sad, anyway. I can’t begin to explain why I’m there now. I could name a couple things, little things, but I won’t. One day I dusted off the scrawny handful of pages that were the three-year-old introduction to Sleeping Kings, and I posted them on a website, and I just kept going.

It’s not easy to write every day. I would encourage all of you to do it, writers or not. Writing is a good discipline. It teaches you to be a better person (I’ve said that before). It teaches you to be in your world, and to be aware of your world. Even if you’re just blogging, journaling, emailing Mom. Whatever it is, write every day.

That’s most of my Me. It sounds like something else, but that’s my journal for the last week or so, everything I haven’t said about what’s going on in my life. What’s going on, is 1,000 words a day. You’d be amazed how much of my life is wrapped up in that right now. Well, unless you know me, in which case you already know.

Here are some things that have happened, that I should have been paying more attention to:

Brad wrote me, again, after three months of silence following the last email he wrote me. He found my blogs, and he wrote me, and I took forever to respond. I finally did, though. He wants to come visit. I can’t say how excited I am at the idea. Yay!

(I continue to have not written Bruce, and my shame piles up. Yea, verily, I am scum.)

Daniel’s back from Europe. Hoo-ah! I believe I’ve already been insulted and flipped off, so life is back to normal. Yay!

We’re hosting Trish’s two nephews, Tweedle Owen and Tweedle Sloan. Thirteen and eleven, give or take. They’re good kids. I kinda dreaded the idea at first, but it’s been good. I’m glad Trish has had this opportunity, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know them better, too. I just hope they’re not sick of me shushing them.

One of my secret projects draws near to a close (or at least a functional Release Version, with GUI updates to follow), and I am beginning to urge my evil cohorts to begin on another secret project, with which I am almost as obsessed as I am with Sleeping Kings. Which makes sense, as the two are rather related. Alas, no details yet, as it would be boring without illustrations, and the illustrations are, themselves, the result of the secret project. I’ll keep you posted, once it’s interesting.

I suppose that’s all. I have something I want to tell you, about Archetypes and Social Construction, but that will be a post of its own. Good day. Smile, if you’ve got anything to smile for.

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Journal Entry: July 4, 2006

Happy Independence Day!

I woke up this morning to a cat with an impressive set of lungs on it. Hmm…okay, some of the more literal ones among you are going to be thinking unpleasant things, so I should be entirely clear: it was yowling for some breakfast. At 6 AM. While I’m on vacation. I woke up, and it showed me where they keep the food, so I fed it.

That’s my morning routine back home, anyway.

Then I didn’t go back to bed, even though I wanted to (also part of my morning routine). I opened up Trish’s laptop, and posted today’s story on Sleeping Kings, and checked my email. I had a really kind email from Bruce.

(I mean to write a post on here sometime telling the story of how I met Bruce, how he became my king, and how he moved all over the world like the police van in a game of Carmen Sandiego.)

I am on vacation, by the way. Did everyone know that? I ended up getting four days for the weekend (by way of using a day’s vacation on Monday), and Heather and Graham had invited everyone to their new home in St. Louis for the Fourth, and we, as a family, have been doing a pretty serious (as in, I can’t get out of it) family reunion sort of a holiday on the Fourth for the last several years so, all of those independent clauses combined, Trish and I drove up to St. Louis Friday night. And here we are.

I have to be back at work tomorrow morning, so we’re actually missing all the Fourth of July stuff. We’re heading home right after lunch today. But, yeah, I’ve been away for the last three days, in case anyone has missed me.

I have this to say: children are noisy things. They are active things. I am neither of those things. Big sigh.

I’ll see you tomorrow. Read Sleeping Kings.

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Journal Entry: June 29, 2006

Y’know how I once said that days off during the week have a ridiculously high chance of going bad?

I took the day off yesterday, mostly to hang out with Trish, partly (and specifically) because we had to go to a closing on the refinancing of our house. Well, that last bit was the part that went bad, this time. It was a tiny portion of the day, really, but it went really bad.

In other news, I saw a snake on the drive in to work this morning!

It was…I mean, massive. I work at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, which is this huge sprawling campus with dozens of buildings, connected with city streets (and way too many stop signs). I was already inside the gates, driving 25 mph down one of these connecting streets toward my building, and in the other lane I saw a huge snake slithering toward the curb. There’s a grassy area out there, and I assume it was heading for cover. I thought about turning around and running it over, but that seemed too cruel.

But…yeah. Big ol’ snake. Yeesh. And that’s my walking route, too, when I walk on my lunch break.

I have…well, at the moment I have three stories that I really want to tell: King Jason’s War, Sleeping Kings, and Faithful Jake. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually do a decent version of Faithful Jake. It seems like it might be too heavy for any kind of audience I could write it for. It strikes me as a powerful story, though.

I have about a dozen stories that I really want to write — the distinction being, these would be more fun for me, even if they’d be less valuable to my readers: The First Myth, Order Knight, Taming Fire and its sequels, someday. Taming Fire is done, after a third rewrite, and at this point I want to rewrite it again into something almost completely different. I’d almost be willing to drop it, like I did my sixth grade stories, but I want to do so much with the sequels, with Daven’s family down the line, and readers will probably want to know where he came from. On that note: The Rise and Fall of the FirstKing, or whatever I actually call it. Probably a three-book cycle, but maybe I’d make it one. Somewhere in with that, a book about the Dauric-Elven war, in which the FirstKing’s mother died, the city of Elspaur was ransacked, and the FirstKing’s ire was first awakened.

There’s also my sci-fi, which I’d like to pursue. I got permission to keep working on (and try to publish, even) the stuff I came up with for Eschaton, back in the day. I really liked the world I’d made, the different factions and the underlying mythos. I’ve got another story idea I like, in a much closer future, about human immortality and nanotech. That could be fun. And there’s the Twilight Zone story I mentioned the other day. The one with Idiene.

Is there anything else? I’d kind of like to rewrite The Poet Alexander someday (the story from which I got the username that I use for this blog, and used forever for all my email accounts). And my sixth grade stories…well, I lied when I said I’d dropped those. The story was originally called The Scorekeeper, and more recently The Watcher or maybe The Watcher of the Winds, but that gives entirely the wrong idea. And the focus has changed, considerably, since I first conceived the idea, so it’s no longer about the Watcher, but about the characters that he inspires to save the world. The…err…four characters, youngish, all with their lives suddenly interrupted, who go about trying to make the world a better place, in the midst of a terrible war….

Aww, man! That’s Sleeping Kings. I just noticed that. Grr. Well, but with more magic. And dragons. Which is probably why I gave up on it. It’s hard for me to write magic and dragons anymore, because the people I want to talk to are the ones who aren’t interested in that sort of thing. The doctor and the sick people, style of thing.

Anyway, those are some things.

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Greatness: Books of Legacy (or “On Fatherhood”)

When I was…I dunno, fifteen or so, my family took a long summer road trip. We’d often done summer road trips as a family for my whole life. This one was the whopper, and my parents had probably been planning it for years.

Trish and I were dating at the time, and I faced the terrifying prospect of being away from her for ten days straight. No phone calls, nothing.

I hated it. I resented it. I…even then, I saw it as a matter of perspective. I sat back and looked at the situation from my perspective (where it was a really big deal), and I could see that, from my parents’ perspective, being away from a girl I didn’t really date yet, for less than two weeks, wasn’t that big a deal.

But I was outraged by it. I came up with an idea, and I put it immediately into practice. I wrote Dad a furious letter, telling him exactly how I felt, exactly how important that summer time with Trish was to me, and how much it hurt that I had to be away from her. That wasn’t exactly the idea, though. My idea was to keep writing letters like this, to write Dad every time I had something important, something dramatic that I wanted to say to him — to write it down, and keep them all together, and save that until I had a son of my own. Then read them all, because that would be exactly the words I needed to hear.

I didn’t stick to it. I wrote only that one letter. The reason was this: well, first, I really don’t stick to very many of my ideas. More importantly, though, everything I had to say in those letters was negative. Because anything positive I had to say, I just said. I’ve usually been pretty good about that. So it would have just been a bunch of whiny letters in poor penmanship.

There are ways in which I really wish I’d followed that through. There would have been some valuable lessons in there, and some powerful reminders. Mostly they’d probably be reminders about what a whiny brat I was, but even those have their value.

Sometime in college, I got an idea for something similar. I think Daniel or Toby, or someone, was telling me about a cultural group that had this practice, but it might have been an original idea….

Anyway, okay, I’ll tell it in story form, because that’s what I do.

Within the history of my fantasy world, there comes eventually a line of kings known as the Davinic Kings — these are the heirs of Daven, centuries later, who reunite and rule over the FirstKing’s old realm, and it’s a time of prosperity and happiness. They are legendary kings (as the similarity of the name would imply).

And I decided that, among themselves, this family of kings would have a practice of writing Books of Legacy. Each king, when he first learned that he was going to have a child, would write a book containing all of his wisdom, all of his experience — everything he truly wanted to teach his son. He would spend the nine months or so writing down his message to his son. When his son reached the age of maturity, his father would give him the book, and perhaps teach it to him.

I thought how cool it would be to write those books, to write the collected teachings that each of these great and powerful men (while they were still young) would like to pass on to their sons and heirs. How much could you say, how much imply, about a character and his world, within that particular framework?

I didn’t follow through on that. I have a few notes scribbled in one of my scribblebooks that I’d intended as some of the bits of wisdom, and I stumbled across those on Sunday morning. Of course, those are only three years old or so, and they already strike me much the same way that my high school rants at my dad would, if I still had those.

And I think that would be a big part of the message. It’s amazing how much we change, from day to day, and I think that’s one of the most awesome things about writing, about setting down, at one time, a whole world, that may seem entirely alien when we look back on it tomorrow. Because we carry our memories with us, and modify them, in subtle ways, to match the world we’re living in now. It’s nice to have something, some hint or snapshot, showing the world as it was, then.

It can be embarrassing. It can be really embarrassing. But that’s part of the process, innit? That’s the price a writer pays, to do this remarkable thing.

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Journal Entry: June 22, 2006

It seems like all I talk about lately is Sleeping Kings. I guess I should feel bad about that, but…I dunno. I haven’t written in so long. And now, this story has me writing again, and remembering why I used to call myself a writer.

Let me tell you, it has nothing to do with my day job.

I once wrote, in a poem, “I write to make a perfect world with words.” That’s funny, under the current circumstances, since (as any of you reading Sleeping Kings knows) I’m in the process of destroying the United States. It’s really pretty miserable for everyone involved.

Trish’s…great second cousin (or something like that) passed away last weekend. She decided to go up to Wichita for the funeral, to be with her family (her Mom in particular). I didn’t really have the leave, and Trish didn’t feel it was crucial that I be there, so I stayed home and worked on Wednesday.

Tuesday night I mostly hung out with Kris and Nicki. We went to some Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner (I had a burger), and I spent the entire time talking about my story. I kept thinking, “Okay, enough, talk about something else.”

I didn’t, though.

So, yeah, same sort of thing is going on here, and I apologize. But, as then, I probably won’t actually change my ways. Sorry.

Also played some WoW with Kris on Tuesday, checked out the new content patch, and then watched Undercover Brother, which I’d gotten him for his birthday. That was a lot of fun. Lynchburg Lemonades helped. I don’t know where Kris learned to make them so well, but he does a fantastic job. Have him make you one sometime. Delish.

And yesterday I worked, and got a day ahead on Sleeping Kings for the first time, and spent all afternoon wanting to post the story I’d just written (the one that’s up there now, as today’s post). Knowing that I have readers actively following the story, it kills me that I have stuff written that I’m not sharing. I’ve got a lot of notes I wrote to myself about what’s going to happen in the story, long-term, and I keep wanting to share those, too, even though they’d be major spoilers.

I’m having to fight down the urge, all the time.

Y’know…I used to feel this way all the time. I don’t really know why I stopped writing. I have some suspicions, and none of them are things I can really control. Which is sad, because it means it could happen again, tomorrow or next week or a year from now. I love it when I’m writing, though. I want to keep it up.

Tonight, I’m going over to Kris’s to play some WoW with everybody (that being Graham, Jeff, Dad, and Kris, natch). Daniel’s not in the list because he’s in Europe, but I think you all knew that.

I’ve been having trouble caring about WoW lately. Kris has never played a lot, and he’s been even busier than normal lately. I’ve got all my characters I care about up to 60 (the level limit), and am close to getting some I don’t care about there, too. And I just don’t think I’d enjoy much of the stuff to do at the end-game. Also, I lost a massive amount of money (in-game) on what should have been a safe investment. So I’m broke, and don’t have much to do, and Daniel and Kris aren’t playing much.

I dunno. There’s still other reasons to play, but too often when I log into the game, I’ve just got nothing to do. So I log back out, but I’ve got nothing else to do. So I log back in. That’s most of my free time, for the last couple weeks.

I’m looking forward to Heroes of Might and Magic V, which might be out already. That could be fun, but I think it’s not an MMO, so I can’t see really getting into it. I’d still like to try Savage, but it came out just before WoW, and WoW distracted me, and by now it’s probably kinda outdated. I don’t really know of anything else on the horizon.

Life is weird. There’s so much, and then there’s so much. You look around, and it’s full of other new things, and they’re all familiar, but if you look close, they’re completely different.

I’m just sayin’, is all.

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Copyright and Me!

Copyright is a tricky thing….

The basic idea is that, by law, you automatically own copyright to anything you create. If I write a poem on a napkin, that poem is copyrighted and I own the copyright.

But what does that really mean?

That means I, alone, have the right to produce, publish, copy, or otherwise distribute the story that I’ve written. If anyone else does, I have the government’s support in suing the offender for any damages I may have suffered (or unlawful gains he may have gotten).

The thing is, the government doesn’t enforce this. They’ll support me, if I try to enforce my own copyright, but the government doesn’t actively enforce anyone’s copyrights.

To make things more complicated, any copyright that is not aggressively defended by its holder will quickly become public domain. That means if somebody steals my idea and starts reproducing it, I can make them stop, but I have to make them stop. The government won’t do it for me. And if I don’t make them stop, then pretty soon I’ll lose the right to do even that.

The process of making them stop requires some sort of proof of original concept. That’s where a lot of people get confused. If I send a cease and desist letter to someone trying to use my story, they might just fire back and tell me to stop using their story, and then we go to court and each try to prove that we started it.

To that end, it’s possible to register a story with the Library of Congress, which is considered pretty definite proof of concept in any U. S. court. That’s about a $250 proposition, if I remember correctly.

I’ve also heard that a reliable (and much cheaper) way to do this is to mail yourself a copy of the story, and not open it. The fact that it’s in a sealed package with a government time-stamp on it makes it a pretty definite piece of evidence. I have no idea if that’s actually true, but I’ve heard it often.

So, here’s the problem with Sleeping Kings. For one, if anyone started to steal it, it would take a while before I found out, most likely, and then I’d have to enlist the aid of a lawyer to try to shut them down (and hope that I could establish proof of originality).

Worse, much worse, would be if someone stole the whole story, submitted it to a publishing house, and successfully sold it. I would hate for someone else to get professionally published off my work, when I haven’t. And, of course, I wouldn’t know about that at all until the book came out. Then I could try suing, but I’d be going up against a major publishing house, and they’ve got good lawyers, y’know? My only real hope then would be to have registered the story with the Library of Congress before the date that the thief entered into negotiations with the publisher.

(Although, if that happened, I’d probably get a lot of money. I doubt the story would ever get published at that point, though, even under my name.)

Ah. And that’s the other problem. Even if no one ever messes with me or steals my story, it’s going to be really hard for me to ever get Sleeping Kings professionally published. Because it already is published.

See, the way an author makes money off his ideas, is to sell his copyright. As I said earlier, for anything I write, I automatically get the right to produce, publish, copy, or otherwise distribute it. The big money is in “first North American distribution rights.” I sell that right to the publisher for a big wad of cash (or a residual contract), and he uses it to print up and distribute copies of my original work. If it sells big, then someday I might want to sell reprint rights, or international rights, or franchise rights (if someone wants to start a series set in my universe).

The internet makes things tricky, though. A publisher could try to argue that this story that I’ve put up on my website is already published, and so he might consider “first North American distribution rights” already used, and his only offer is going to be for reprints, which don’t sell for nearly as much money.

The long and the short of it is that I’m aware of all these things going into the project. Sleeping Kings is not much like anything else I’ve written, or anything else I ever intend to write. It could get stolen from me, and then I’d have a good sad story to put in my autobiography. It could become huge but, because of the way I managed things, I may never make a penny off it. Or it could just be a quiet little weblog, that no one ever reads, and still I can’t sell it because the publisher learns it was posted at all.

Copyright is a tricky thing. I do reserve all rights to everything I post, here or on Sleeping Kings. To an extent, though, I need to be read to keep writing, and if major publishing houses aren’t willing to pick my stuff up, I’ve got to do something. That’s what I’m trying. We’ll all watch and see what happens.

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Journal Entry: June 19, 2006

Back to work.

Yesterday was a good weekend. Actually, taken in combination with the better aspects of Saturday (and ignoring the worse ones), I’d go so far as to say I had a really good weekend.

I’m excited about Sleeping Kings. In the past, I’ve said that because I was just excited that it was still going, that I was still writing daily. Now, I’m more excited about the story itself, and how the characters are coming together and the story is starting to pick up pace.

Y’know… I was talking to Nicki about this before, when she asked me why I stopped writing Sleeping Kings three years ago. It was always an idea I liked. And I’ve always thought it would be fun to write a serial novel.

I worked on one for an ex-girlfriend, actually. I think about that, from time to time. Girl I dated in high school, I would write her four pages every day, and slip them into her locker on my way out of school (for some reason, she stayed later than I did).

I kept that up for the entire time we were dating. She loved the story. We broke up, it was kinda ugly (I brought the drama, go fig), and then I never really talked to her again. Oh! No, this isn’t Lindsey. All of the above was true for Lindsey, too, but I never wrote her a story.

Anyway, I’d given her my only copy of the story, handwritten as I went. I don’t remember anything about the story now. I don’t know if I’d try to rewrite it if I did. But…yeah. That was my first attempt at a periodic novel.

My second was Sleeping Kings. If you noticed, reading the prologue, I got about five installments done. About 2-3 pages per installment. That…that’s really not very much. That’s maybe an afternoon’s work, if I’d done it all at once.

That’s pretty sad.

Here’s the thing about periodic novels: it takes a lot out of you, every single day (or week, or month, depending on the periodicity). Yeah, sure, a couple of my favorite authors wrote periodic novels. They also got paid for them. I can emulate them out of academic and professional interest, y’know, because it’s cool, but I don’t have newspapers looking to support an author for a weekly contribution the way they did.

So, the point is, from now on it’s going to cost you $4.95 every time you access Sleeping Kings. Sorry, but it had to be done.

*Sigh.*

No, not really. That would be way cool, but no. Actually, what I was going to say, is that this time part of what I’m getting out of it is just the process of writing. It had been so long since I really wrote, that I do, to a big extent, feel like getting something published (albeit in a cheap and easy medium) is its own reward, to an extent.

The other thing I’m taking in payment is feedback. Comments. So when I’m bugging you for a response, try to remember that the response is much of what keeps me going. I’m not just trying to be annoying — knowing (or imagining) that I have readers out there anxiously wondering what’s going to happen today is a big part of what makes me post something today.

Also…I commented to Heather earlier about this. I’m trained — college-educated — to take any kind of feedback at all, and make the most of it. So don’t feel like there’s any burden on you to say something special, or something important. Just say anything at all. Whatever you’re feeling after you read a post, that’s useful information to me.

Beh. I don’t mean to sound like I’m coming here begging. Just wanted to share a little insight into my process.

Also: I really hope you like the story. Deep down, I do. Who doesn’t want to be liked, y’know?

Other notes:

Nacho Libre is fantastically good. Go see it, for yeah. Funny. Worth a laugh. On a similar note, Mom and Dad insist that you should go see Over the Hedge. I haven’t been an obedient son yet, though, so I can’t confirm or deny their praise.

*Spoilers* Nate dies in Act II. It’s very sad.

Oh. So, like, three years ago, I spent several months writing a lot of Python scripts for our modded XBoxen. They were moderately useful. The most useful things I made were an emulator so other developers could write XBox scripts on their computers, and a detailed, formally laid-out tutorial for new developers wanting to know how to write Python scripts for XBox. I actually took an existing one, that was very poor English and miserably laid-out, and just tech-writed it.

Anyway, I put these up on my cheesy free website provided by Cox, and out of curiosity I got a counter, and for the four to six months I was working on it, I was getting around ten thousand hits a month, on average.

That’s kind of a lot, for a little thing like that.

Anyway, when we moved, it got chopped down. That was sad, but it had been years since I did anything with it, so I just thought, “Aww, how sad for them,” and forgot about it.

It just occurred to me today, on the drive in to work, that I could really easily re-create the same email address I’d used then, post all of the old website up to the automatically-created cheesy free website, and the entire site would be available again, at the exact same address.

Took me about twenty minutes, and now all those years-old links still work, and everything. I’m glad I did that. Yay me.

That’s all.