Lousy parking

Don’t you hate it when you squeeze your car into an awkward but available parking spot, and then everyone else around you leaves and you come out an hour later and your car is sitting all by itself, cock-eyed, making you look like you were drunk or debilitated when you left it there? That’s what happened to me a couple of hours ago. Even I was starting to wonder if I was drunk when I parked!

Heard back from my agent and we’re pretty much ready to go. We’re going to take two weeks to do independent read-throughs to check for any last-minute glitches and then away it goes. By Easter, I’d guess, if all goes according to schedule. It’s only taken two years to get it to this point.

I think that in the past two or three weeks I’ve experienced a fundamental change in my approach to writing. I went through a period where I wasn’t writing anything new at all in terms of fiction. Not for lack of trying. I had a bunch of anthology guidelines printed out and I really wanted to try to contribute something to them, and I saw one deadline after another pass by. I’d make false starts, restarts, try flying at a story from different directions. Nothing.

I realized that I was writing for the sake of writing and not because I had anything particular to say. In other words, I was forcing stories where there weren’t any. I had ideas (see my Storytellers Unplugged essay from a week ago), but no stories to go along with them, and I was trying to shove words onto the page just to get from Point A to Point Z.

How did I come to this realization? By getting back to working on something that was inwardly motivated. I wrote nearly 2000 words this morning on the novel I lied to you about a couple of posts back. The words just flowed, as if the tap had opened. When I wasn’t working on the tale, I was thinking about it, and thinking in the constructive way that leads to story. Working out what the characters were thinking, mostly, and how that would manifest itself in the plot.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up writing for anthologies when I see the chance and am truly inspired. I had a story accepted for a pretty big anthology last week, but I can’t mention it until the official announcement goes out. Suffice to say that I’m thrilled to be part of it and it should help to get my work before a different audience. I also have a story proposal in for another anthology and would really like to have something for Jeff Strand’s. But what I hope I’ve learned is to not work so hard at an on-spec story when I really have reached the bottom of the well as far as inspiration goes for the story.

The car story wasn’t intended as a metaphor. Funny.