This question came up on a thread in r/writing on Reddit from a writer trying to attract followers on Twitter. Although my answer is geared therefore towards authors who tweet, I think it's good advice in general for anyone seeking to establish a genuine online presence on Twitter that's worth following:
Don't just follow your friends/followers! Use a Twitter client that allows you to monitor multiple hashtags- follow tags like #writing, #amwriting, #abna (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards), #litchat, #pubwrite, #authors, etc. Hashtags are conversations. Don't be afraid to jump in, reply, and retweet, but don't go crazy and blow up peoples' tweetstreams with multiple serial RTs and replies all at once.
Tweet about a variety of topics. This might sound a little counterintuitive, but writers who tweet about nothing but writing are boring, and run the risk of coming off as shills. Tweet about other things that interest you- for example, I like to tweet about libraries (I'm a librarian), D&D and gaming in general, the Boston Red Sox, and how the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority ruins my commute pretty much every other day. Not only will you pick up more followers this way, but it also helps your real personality shine through online and makes your tweetstream seem like less of a marketing gimmick.
Do not automate your tweets- this may work for larger organizations but it's never a good idea for an individual. Also be careful about overly clogging your tweetstream with third-party app tweets. No one will begrudge you the occasional Foursquare check-in binge, but if most of your tweets are coming from apps people are simply going to tune you out.
Direct Messaging strangers is creepy. Just don't do it!
Share links to interesting and informative content. Reddit may have seen it all already, but never underestimate the RT power of a quality cat meme. I follow a ton of RSS feeds in Google Reader, which makes it easy to share content out to social networks. If I found something worth reading, chances are someone else out there on Twitter will as well. The internet is such a wild and woolly place that people who help make sense of it for others are valued in social networks. If you establish yourself as a thoughtful digital curator, people will follow you.
Be authentic in your tweets. As much as it seems to be driven by celebrities and Trending Topics, Twitter does actually reward original expression and the clever turn of phrase. Think of a RT as an upvote here on Reddit and you'll get the idea. Have opinions. Make jokes. Show some genuine emotion. Provide running commentary to that morning's episode of The Price Is Right (helpful hint: people on Twitter LOOOOOOOVE Plinko).
So that's pretty much how I've built up a modest Twitter following. It won't happen overnight, but you'll be surprised how tweeting on a consistent basis on a wide range of topics will translate into a steady trickle of new followers. The key is engagement. If you don't put anything into Twitter, do not expect anything substantive out of it in return.
To celebrate Friday the 13th, the Red Sox home opener, and a successful first 100 days of Making It Happen in 2012 (also to take my mind off the fact that I'll be spending the whole day in job interviews), I'm offering my three horror novellas for free in the Amazon Kindle Store:
The Boston Red Sox may have finally reversed the Curse of the Bambino in 2004, but only a few know the true story of what actually happened that fateful season. When a grand piano is found at the bottom of a lake in Quincy, James Flynn -- hot dog vendor at Fenway Park and seventh son of a seventh son -- finds himself drawn into a world of demons, exorcists, and MIT's mysterious Department of Alchemy, where a group of secret paranormal researchers are preparing for a final showdown with one of baseball's most legendary players. "Bambino" is a 14,000 word novella about demons, exorcism, and America's Greatest Pastime.
Farrell's Island is only a myth, they say- something that the old salts of Cape Ann whisper about in hushed tones after one too many drinks at the bar. But when two unlucky fishermen set out in search of this fabled isle, will their obsession land them a much more dangerous catch than they'd bargained for? "Keeper" is a 11,000 word New England fishing yarn in the style of H.P. Lovecraft about the one that should have gotten away.
As the star reporter for Get Out Magazine, Gerald McKenna has traveled the world in search of adventure. When he is sent on assignment back to the Jersey Shore, however, he learns that going home can not only be a thrill... it can be downright deadly! "High Tide" is a 14,000 word horror novella about surfing with the sharks down at the Jersey Shore.
Download these three stories for free starting Friday (4/13) through this Sunday (4/15)!
When I jumped into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean on New Year's Day after deciding that it was time to change everything about my life that was frustrating me, I don't think I gave myself enough credit that I would have the courage of my convictions to see the process through. Well, here I am after 100 days of Making It Happen in 2012 and to say that I am pleasantly surprised to have confounded my own expectations in this regard would be the mother of all understatements.
Painting myself into a corner by taking my resolutions public was, in retrospect, a very good idea- one that began when I committed myself to the Rocky Neck Plunge with my fellow Gloucestermen (and women!) on Good Morning Gloucester. I may excel at letting myself down when left to my own devices, but the prospect of having to explain myself to my Facebook friends and Twitter followers proved to be an excellent form of motivation when all else failed.
The decision to Live Out Loud also tickled my obsessive-compulsive urge to document my progress, something which I know also helped keep me on track with my weight loss. If Weight Watchers Online provided the app for accurately gauging what went into my body, social media provided the wherewithal for measuring the output of my self-improvement efforts: pounds shed, words published, fears confronted, and future reimagined.
I thank the people who read this blog, who reply to my Tweets, and like my status reports on Facebook (and those of you who +1 me on Google+ as well). Whether you realized it or not, you have managed to help keep me on target over these past three months and ten days, and I am eternally grateful for your moral support- past, present, and future.
So... here are the numbers to date:
1. Pounds Lost: 43
2. Stories Self-Published on Amazon: 4 short stories, 1 novel
3. Jobs applied for: 3
4. Attitude improvement: 100%
Here's to another awesome 100 days! Rest assured that I will keep all of you updated as I continue along my path to a brand new me...
A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about my pledge only to read self-published fiction in 2012, an experiment in what is known as "dogfooding," whereby an individual or company opts to use its own product in a vote of confidence. Since I have decided to make an honest attempt to self-publish my fiction (at Amazon, Smashwords, and elsewhere), I thought it was only fair that I should purchase and read the works of my self-pubbed peers, as otherwise I would be something of a hypocrite.
After announcing my intentions to eat nothing but self-publishing dogfood for an entire year, I was asked whether I was planning to review the books I read during my experiment. Fellow self-pubbed authors wished me well and wanted to follow my progress, and even people who regarded this idea as little more than a masochistic exercise in literary self-flagellation were nonetheless rather curious to see how it would turn out. Thus the Dogfood Chronicles were born.
My first review is Speculation, a literary thriller by Edmund Jorgensen. Before I proceed, however, I must confess that this book just so happens to be the self-published novel of a dear friend from college. He and I both decided to take the plunge in offering our books on Amazon around the same time. Lest I be accused of using this review to garner Edmund any undue sales advantage, however, I should point out that Speculation is currently blowing up the paid Kindle rankings in Amazon - right now he's #144 - entirely on the merits of his own storytelling.
Andrew, a struggling professor of philosophy at an unnamed Boston university, is presented with a conundrum when his best friend from college "Sothum" dies and wills him a choice between receiving ten million dollars or the contents of a sealed envelope. Does Andrew take the safe bet so that he never need worry about money again, or does he take the envelope, whose contents are a complete mystery?
While his wife Cheryl sees this as a simple decision - i.e., take the money and don't look back - she begrudgingly indulges Andrew's natural curiosity as he tries to figure out what could possibly be worth passing up a fortune. Is it even more money, or better yet the secret of Sothum's financial success, or is the envelope empty, a final cruel practical joke from beyond the grave? The fact that Sothum is implicated in the disappearance of a mutual friend (a writer named Buddy) only serves to complicate Andrew's choice.
The more that Andrew investigates into Sothum's weird and reclusive life, the deeper he finds himself drawn into a philosophical puzzle which threatens not just the stability of his marriage but his own mental health as well. Will he follow his best friend all the way down the rabbit hole to satisfy his need to know the truth at any cost, or will Andrew leave Sothum's final riddle unsolved and choose life, love, and sanity instead?
Author Edmund Jorgensen sets the bar high with his debut novel, but Speculation delivers on its promise. Jorgensen paces his story masterfully, interweaving bittersweet college reminiscences with a gradually unfolding mystery, all the while raising the emotional stakes with every chapter and new revelation. This progression is executed in such a subtle fashion that when Sothum's at-first almost sophomoric meditations on the meaning of life, chance, and fate suddenly take on a very real and truly terrifying aspect, the reader is blindsided by the transformation.
Despite these elements of suspense, Speculation is at its heart an Intellectual Bromance, in the grand tradition of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Indeed, Andrew, Sothum, and their third friend Buddy are as entertainingly clever and inextricably doomed as Eco's Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon were. The downward spiral of intense friendship also calls to mind the philosophically rich but emotionally damaged relationship between Louis and Lestat in Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. In a less capable writer's hands, Speculation's choice would never have been a real head-scratcher, but the author's genius is that despite yourself you can't help but find that you have been seduced by Sothum's demented brilliance in perfect lockstep with Andrew's first-person narrator. Jorgensen not only captures the cerebral intoxication and Platonic intensity that so frequently occurs in one's heady years as a young impressionable college student, but he turns them against you so expertly that you can only admire the artfulness of the betrayal.
Is there any downside to this book at all? I'll be damned if I can find one. Not only is Speculation engaging and intellectually satisfying, it is also extraordinarily well-written, edited, and professionally polished. So why isn't this book already on the shelves of your local bookstore? In private conversation, the author confided that literary agents generally had high praise for his manuscript when he made the query rounds, but even the most kindly-disposed said they'd be at a loss to market it. Their loss, to be sure!
That a book of this quality would never see the light of day is the reason I decided to take a chance on self-publishing myself, and I'm heartened that my friend Edmund has also decided to make the leap. Even if you have been lukewarm on self-pubbed authors thus far, I strongly recommend that you give Speculation a chance. If this first review in the Dogfood Chronicles is any indication of just how much undiscovered literary talent there is out there in the so-called "digital slush pile," I'm in for a very rewarding year of reading...
My name is Tom Bruno, and until this year I was a self-publishing hypocrite.
You see, although I had decided to take my fantasy novel Confessions of a Gourmand - which I had shopped around to prospective agents only to get a couple of encouraging words but nothing more - and offer it online as a Kindle edition through Amazon, up to that point I had only read one self-published book (which a friend had written a couple of years ago, way ahead of the self-pub revolution) and nothing else, always opting for traditionally-published fiction instead whenever it came time to decide on something new to read.
That I didn't see this for the hypocrisy that it was is testament to how deeply ingrained the bias against self-publication is among would-be authors such as myself. Even now many aspiring writers would still rather keep editing, workshopping, and re-writing their manuscripts and querying the ever-shrinking pool of literary agents or publishing houses in hopes of landing a contract rather than attach the stigma of self-publication to their books. To these defenders of the traditional publishing model, self-publication is nothing more than a vast digital slush pile that floods the market with writing that didn't deserve to be published in the first place and drowns out "legitimate" authors from getting more attention than they would have gotten otherwise.
Or so the argument goes. This post is not about debating whether or not this is in fact true, although my own personal belief is that quality will always find its way to the top, and that (in the words of a fellow self-published author) "I'd much rather have 10000 people write crap and enjoy doing what they're doing than 9999 people never let their work see the light of day". No, this is about practicing what I preach. If I truly feel that self-publishing has become as legitimate a path for writers as the traditional publication route, then shouldn't I be supporting self-published authors with my dollars and my reading time?
There's a term for this: Dogfooding. Eating your own dogfood is a concept that goes back to the 1980's, supposedly from the old ads for Alpo dog food featuring Lorne Greene, who made a point of saying in the commercial that he fed his own dogs Alpo. It was a Microsoft executive who coined the actual phrase, however, expanding the concept beyond actual dogfood into a general vote of confidence in one's product by promoting its use by your own employees. Dogfooding is therefore not just an exercise in public relations, but an active proof of concept.
I've decided to adopt this idea and apply it to self-publishing - to that end, I've resolved that I will only read self-published fiction in 2012. So far I have read three self-pubbed works this year: two novels and a novella. One was a literary thriller, another a fantasy offering, and the the third was a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale. All three were excellent, and each could just as easily have been published via traditional means, had the authors chosen to pursue that route.
While I'm sure that during my yearlong experiment in dogfooding I will no doubt find myself forced to wolf down an unappetizing clunker or two, I must say that I am encouraged by the quality of these initial readings. Perhaps there's more good stuff to be found out there than self-publishing's many detractors would have us believe...
Though my Make It Happen 2012 blog posts have been a little fewer and further between, rest assured that I am holding the course:
1. As of this morning I have lost 28.8 pounds since starting with Weight Watchers Online at the beginning of January, which means I've officially reached my 10% milestone! At this point I only have 46 pounds to go in order to reach my goal of 199 pounds- I'm more than 1/3 of the way there now...
2. I've gotten serious about the business end of my writing, with the result that every weekend I have either posted a new story online for sale or offered a promotion for an existing work.
4. Also, I've decided to relaunch the Confessions of a Gourmand blog and post new updates as Van d'Allamitri travels the world and tries to sell his novel (and I attempt to do the same in the real world). I'm hoping to include not just additional fantasy food dispatches but also have Van solicit and answer reader questions about his own life as well as life in the Three Continents.
5. The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest announces its Round Two authors this Thursday (February 23rd). I'm eager to see if my fantasy novel The Librarian's Tale made it to the second round!
So that's it for now- more random bullet points of awesomeness soon, I promise.
Inspired by the positive experience of other ebook writers, I've decided to enroll Confessions of a Gourmand, or How to Cook a Dragon in Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Select program-- in return for offering my novel exclusively on Amazon for three months, I get to promote it as a free download for five days.
Confessions will be available for free at the Kindle store starting today until February 8th. Please give it a try! If you enjoy the book, I humbly ask that you tell a friend or leave a review on Amazon. Many thanks in advance...
Amid the backdrop of interstellar war, a librarian at the edge of the galaxy must make a decision which will determine the course of the rest of his life. "Bibliophile" is a 11,000-word short story and the first installment in a series of library-themed science fiction called L is for Librarian. It's available for sale now in the following formats:
So the first month of 2012 has already come and gone. What do I have to show for it?
1. I've lost over 20 pounds, thanks to Weight Watchers Online and a renewed commitment to walking in the morning and getting out of the house and into the outdoors on the weekends. Not only do all of my clothes fit better, but I'm no longer plagued by sleep apnea at night, which means that these days I'm actually waking up feeling well-rested. Aside from the other obvious health benefits, a good night's sleep is probably the greatest side-effect of my weight loss thus far. I am also cooking a great deal more than I had been in 2011, not just for myself and my wife but for my daughter, who is becoming increasingly adventurous with her PKU vegetarian diet and is demanding more and more variety at the dinner table.
2. I spent some quality time with the business end of my writing- not only did I enter my novel The Librarian's Tale into the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, but I am also selling a new short story (both online and with a print edition coming soon!) and have recently completed a revised and expanded edition of my first novel Confessions of a Gourmand. More about both of these things soon! Next up on the writing front is editing, polishing, and releasing the Varonian Nights saga on the new platform my best friend and I have set up as a fantasy portal.
3. Speaking of my writing, I have been actively working on a new short story as well as several new blog posts about the Harvard Library reorganization. Before Make It Happen 2012, I'm not sure I would have felt as confident in posting my own thoughts and opinions about what's going on here at the World's Greatest University, but I believe this crisis for all of its challenges has promoted a great deal of introspection throughout our organization as well as the rest of the library world, so I'm glad I was able to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.
Not bad for 31 days. Here's to keeping up the momentum in February and beyond!
One of the things that I resolved to do as part of Make It Happen 2012 was to pay closer attention to the business side of my writing. While I always seem able to find the time to eke out a few words here and there on a new project, when it comes to editing, polishing, submitting, or self-publishing my works online I tend to procrastinate like there's no tomorrow. Today however I took advantage of a lazy Sunday afternoon to finally get my entry for this year's Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest ready for submission. Although I had entered the 2010 competition (with my fantasy novel Confessions of a Gourmand (/shamelessplug)) and actually made it to the second round, for various reasons I ended up missing the deadline for last year's contest and regretted it terribly for not having given it another try.
Well, I'm back this year with a new entry-- another fantasy novel called The Librarian's Tale. However I fare this time, I will be sure to release the book as a Kindle edition, just as I did with Confessions, but in the meanwhile wish me luck!
(I've also been working on something else today, but I'm saving that announcement for tomorrow for reasons which I hope will become obvious. Let's call it the best kind of procrastination...)
Okay, so my last post of 2011 was on October 31. Why so much radio silence?
Although I didn't end up doing NaNoWriMo, I was inspired nevertheless to kickstart my creative writing again. Having just finished reading Michael A. Burstein's excellent sci-fi anthology I Remember the Future, I decided to return to science fiction myself and wrote "Bibliophile," an 11,000-word short story about a librarian at the edge of the galaxy.
I wasn't even a few hundred words into the effort when it suddenly hit me- why not write a whole collection of sci-fi shorts where librarians are the central characters? As an homage to Ray Bradbury, I'm going to name this anthology "L is for Librarian" (after Bradbury's own collections "R is for Rocket" and "S is for Space"). I'm already working on the next installment, and am busy brainstorming the stories after that.
The breakthrough for me on this particular project was that I realized that of the several science fiction short story ideas I had gestating, the common theme which ran through most of them was that they all somehow involved a library or librarian. I know, what are the odds? Even the ones which didn't feature a librarian, however, took on a new creative life once I started to re-imagine them with this new focus. Which just goes to demonstrate the inherent awesomeness of librarianship... I wonder if I manage to post a copy of "Bibliophile" and sell it before ALA Midwinter, would I be eligible for The Great Librarian Write-Out Award?
I promise to share the first story in L is for Librarian in the near future (getting my writing organized and for sale online is a big part of Make It Happen 2012), but in the meantime I thought I'd let you know what was keeping me away from my blog for all of these weeks. I hope you'll agree that it was a worthy cause, but I promise not to keep you in the dark about such matters for so long in the future!
That is the question I ask myself every time this year, ever since National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) made its debut in 1999. Its premise is simple: write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November, a challenge which has attracted more and more participants every year- from just 21 in 1999 to over 200,000 brave souls for NaNoWriMo 2010. I took part in '06 and '09, finishing (or "winning") both times, and heinous as my schedule is this November I'm seriously thinking about making another go of it this year.
Why NaNo? For those who have never written something ambitious as a novel-length work of fiction before, NaNoWriMo is a dare to stop talking about writing that book and just do it already. Many would-be writers get themselves fatally tripped up over whether or not what they have to say is any good, with the result that they endless obsess over every single word they write. With its strict and unforgiving deadline, NaNo takes that kind of self-consciousness out of the equation. In order to write 50,000 words in a month, one must crank out an average of 1,667 words per day, which means if you attempt to stop and edit yourself as you write you will never make it to the finish line.
Just keep writing.
The other brilliant thing about NaNo is that it readily accepts the fact that most of the fifty thousand-plus words that each contestant writes will be crap. Of course it's crap! The point of National Novel Writing Month is not to produce a perfect literary specimen in thirty days or less, it's to produce. Many would-be writers are experts at starting things, but NaNoWriMo challenges you to take an idea and see it through to its conclusion. Yes, it's going to an unholy mess, riddled with plot holes, gaping continuity errors, and more typos than a text message conversation between a couple of teenagers. But it will be finished. And that's an accomplishment to be proud of no matter what you end up doing with your novel.
I get tired of the NaNo haters who come out around this time every year like clockwork to deride the whole event as a gimmick at best or in the worst case an affront to "real" writers, who as they are so quick to point out spend their whole year writing and do not appreciate having the market flooded with NaNo hacks who think that just because they finally wrote that novel that they deserve to have it published.
How to respond to these criticisms? First of all, simply hating on NaNo in general is like giving a person shit for wanting to run a marathon. Both of these things are extremely hard, each in its own way pushing a human being to the absolute limits of their physical or creative endurance, and I honestly cannot think of a reason not to encourage anyone who is brave or foolish enough to attempt either endeavor.
Second, I happen to know a lot of writers-- including published authors-- who participate in NaNoWriMo. Although this event is often negatively portrayed as one extended Amateur Night for literary wannabes, there are many people (such as myself) who have no problem with getting words onto the page but view NaNo as an opportunity to shake things up creatively. To return to the running metaphor, even if you do write or at least try to write during the other eleven months out of the year, National Novel Writing Month is like suddenly running wind sprints for thirty days. Even if you've already won in a previous year, the effort itself can still be exhilarating nevertheless.
And as for the concern that we who NaNo are flooding the fiction market every December 1st, if you look at the broader trends of digitization and self-publishing which are currently causing the publishing industry to implode, I think the literary efforts of each year's NaNoWriMo cohort are merely a drop in a vast ocean of radical change that is only just beginning to redefine our notions of writing and authorship in the 21st century and beyond.
So if you're thinking about participating in National Novel Writing Month, I say go for it. Whether I decide to join you or not this year, be sure that I will be cheering you all along the way next month. One of the best features of NaNoWriMo is the sense of community which it engenders, from the NaNo message boards to the Municipal Liaisons program providing mutual support and encouraging people to gather and write together in public, as well as the lively NaNoWriMo groups on Facebook and the Twitter hashtag. If you choose to NaNo, you are never alone, and many times that feeling that you have a quarter of a million people pulling for you is all you need to muster all those extra adverbs to get you across the 50k mark.
Good luck, all, and remember to just keep writing!
(NOTE: This is my extraordinarily belated contribution to Speak Out With Your Geek Out, weeklong celebration of our geeky hobbies and/or obsessions that I learned about from fellow library blogger Jessica Olin. I had meant to have this post finished in time, but sometimes my words take on a life of their own... which I suppose is the theme of this post!)
It all began with a dot and four letters on a hand-drawn map: VARO.
The year was 1989, and I was in between my junior and senior years at high school. Back then summers meant one thing: unlimited time to play Dungeons and Dragons, and I took advantage of this opportunity to run my most ambitious campaign to date. Unlike previous games I had Dungeon Mastered, which were all set in fantasy worlds that had been created by the role-playing game's designers, this would be a universe entirely of my own creation. The players' home base would be a port town on the edge of the world's arctic circle, and I had already scrawled a map of the adjacent coastline roughly the size of New England hinting at all of the exciting places the adventurers could go to seek their fortune: the haunted dwarven ruins of Ironhold to the east, the bustling river city Cherindal to the south, and of course the frozen wastes surrounding the Northern Citadel, which guarded ominously against an unnamed threat (shades of George R.R. Martin two years before his Game of Thrones).
Surely this would be enough to keep my players busy, but no sooner had they reached these far-flung locales than they demanded to know what lay beyond. For example, this "Great Sea" they had been sailing on-- how far did it stretch? Hastily I drew a larger-scale map depicting the body of water's westernmost shore. The blank coastline looked lonely, however, so I placed a city where one might expect one, and named it "Varo" without giving it much additional thought. After all, it was three thousand miles away...
"Varo?" one of my players asked dubiously as he inspected the new map. "What's that?"
I stammered as I thought on my feet: "Umm, it's a city of merchant princes. Yeah. Their trade galleys can be found all over the Great Sea."
This seemed enough to mollify him. "Cool!"
I'd like to say there was something more to it, as might befit the founding legend of a great city- but alas, Varo was born without the divine fanfare or inexplicable fratricide that seems to accompany the establishment of cities in Graeco-Roman antiquity. And yet a seed had been planted nevertheless, although it wasn't for a year and a half later that it would germinate and sprout into something real. It was the Fall of my freshman year at MIT and I had just discovered that my new housemate and soon-to-be best friend was also a big-time D&D geek. As often occurs when this sort of thing happens, we immediately began swapping old campaign stories (your local VFW Post hasn't got anything on a veteran Dungeon Master!).
In an attempt to impress my new friend, for some reason I started talking about Varo. Never mind that I hadn't run so much as a session in that city situated on the far-flung shore of my own imagination-- I had recently been doing some undergraduate research for an archaeology professor studying early Renaissance Venice, and as I spoke about this city of merchant princes I found myself drawing heavily on my recent background readings to invest this fantasy locale with life.
Varo was like Venice, of course, but there had to be a twist. I can still remember that moment, standing in the kitchen of German House, when my ability to produce extemporaneous creative bullshit went into hyperdrive. It was like Venice, but it was bigger. Much bigger. A million souls living in decrepit high-rise insulae like in Ancient Rome along fetid canals suddenly sprang into existence, but why were they there? Because Varo, like Venice, was the center of commerce for the civilized world, but unlike Venice it had never lost its position of preeminence. Yes. But how had they maintained their dominance? Drawing upon Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, I imagined that the Varonians had found a way to use mathematics to predict the future and rig the world's markets in their favor, with the result that history itself had ground to a halt.
In just moments Varo had gone from just a name on a map to a dreary postmodern fantasy metropolis that was basically cyberpunk with crossbows (I'd later settle on "crossbow noir"). Great Houses vied with one another for supremacy over the information economy while the City itself bled the world dry. The more I padded out this dystopia, the more I fell in love with it... and so did my friend.
"So when do I get a chance to play in this world?" he asked.
Over the next two years my friend and I explored the City of Varo. I'd never DM'ed a solo campaign before, but this was a game world that seemed to beg for a unique first-person perspective. My friend had rolled up a bounty hunter character who was equal parts Blade Runner and Philip Marlowe, and I responded by crafting mystery after mystery for the fantasy gumshoe to solve, all the while fleshing out more and more of the setting. This was Varo's formative period, and even though we didn't run more than a couple of dozen sessions the City had burned itself indelibly into our imaginations, so much so that we were able to run one adventure while driving cross-country from Pittsburgh to Washington State, sans books, dice, or notes, guided only by our shared memory of a place which didn't exist.
Somewhere along the way my friend and I got it into our heads to publish Varo as its own fantasy roleplaying game. If either of us hadn't been so preoccupied with washing out of MIT and figuring out what that meant in the Grand Scheme of Things, we might very well have pulled something off. As it stood we did manage to flesh out both the mores and mechanics of this parallel universe, so that even as it defied any attempts to be published it continued to gain life nevertheless. Like that game Katamari Damacy, where a little ball sticks to everything it touches until it rolls itself into a giant agglomeration of everything, so too did Varo absorb every piece of culture I encountered- every book I read, fiction or nonfiction, every T.V. show or movie I watched. It eventually reached a point where I no longer had to consciously add to this world- it added to itself constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly.
Varo was alive.
My best friend decided to find his fortune on the other side of the continent, during which time we managed to continue via email the solo adventures of his bounty hunter, who had left the City and gone traveling himself. At the time I don't think I had appreciated the irony, but there it was. Not only was our hero travelling the wilderness in true Joseph Campbell fashion but the entire world was following him. In what sort of cosmos had we situated our fantasy dystopia? Through a couple of novella's worth of email correspondence my friend and I attempted to figure this out.
It may have continued this way indefinitely if not for my wife, who enters the story at this point. To say that I had misgivings about sharing this fantasy world with others would be something of an understatement. Playing D&D was one thing, even running it as a Dungeon Master was another, but this particular brand of world-building had become an all-consuming endeavor. How would I even begin to explain this to someone with absolutely no frame of reference? But I was in love, so I did my best to try, telling the creation story of Varo to her on our first long-distance drive from Boston to New Jersey. Instead of driving her away screaming, not only was she absolutely fascinated despite being neither a gamer nor a fantasy or sci-fi geek (I managed to change the latter in the fullness of time, although I don't think she'll ever be a gamer ((fortunately our daughter is more after my own heart in this regard!)), but she challenged me to try again to publish.
This time I wrote. Okay, my friend and I did make another college try at publishing which actually resulted in a (albeit rough) first draft of a sourcebook, but at the same time I set my mind to exploring the world of Varo through my fiction. I had just started writing again in earnest after about ten years of writer's block, and once I'd gotten half a dozen short stories under my belt I felt it was finally time to attempt a novel. The protagonist of this tale would be a young chef, as the idea would be to describe my fantasy setting primarily through its food. "Confessions of a Gourmand," I'd call it, and over the next three years I would struggle to bring this novel out of my imagination and onto paper, all the while investing Varo with yet another dimension.
After Confessions was complete I promised myself I would give genre fiction a break, but with the challenge of NaNoWriMo 2006 just around the corner I left my then work-in-progress- a novel about my time at MIT that I was tentatively titling "Sex, Drugs, and Acapella"- and returned to Varo to write The Librarian's Tale, which viewed my fantasy setting through the eyes of the City's chief rival, Iskandalon, the City of Letters to Varo's Republic of Numbers. I was astonished at how easily the words came over the space of a month, such that I had a fully-formed novel by the end of that November. Surely I had written Varo out of my system by now, or so I had reasoned, but the truth was that I was only getting started.
Varonian Nights came into existence in the Winter of 2008, breaking another writing dry spell that had coincided with my first year as a professional librarian, when all thought of creative output had been squelched by simply trying not to get fired. When at last the chaos of my new job had settled into something a little more manageable, I decided the best way to jump back into my writing would be a new short story- this time one that was set in Varo. I think I was inspired by my friend Jason, who was currently getting his MFA in Creative Writing and had a class project for which he was writing a fantasy novel that consisted of several interrelated short stories. Whatever the impetus, "Red Legion," aka Varonian Nights #1, was short, action-packed, and exactly what I'd needed to recharge my imagination. No sooner had I finished it than I'd immediately launched into the next tale, envisioning an anthology of eleven short stories when all was said and done which I finished earlier this year.
However, in the middle of this collection I decided to give NaNoWriMo yet another go (in November 2009), in part to see whether I still had it in me, but also because I had a story idea that I just couldn't resist telling- i.e., a new mystery for my co-conspirator's bounty hunter protagonist to solve. The result was a novella I called "Eight," which is still quite raw and is still in need of a third act, but it was fascinating to return to the perspective of the character which had quite literally started it all. Not only had this individual grown up, but so had the City and the entire world around him, such that returning to his point of view felt like I had almost come full circle.
Almost, but not quite...
The summer before last my best friend and I decided to attend GenCon in grand fashion- instead of flying out, we would drive to Indianapolis and back, making a proper road trip of it. Along the way we talked of little else than Varo, as I brought him up to speed with Varonian Nights and Eight and he filled me in on various mechanics problems that he'd been working on in his spare time. For just as I would default to imagining another corner of this fantasy world whenever my brain had a spare cycle, he would open up his notebook and start hacking his own set of homebrewed rules which accurately captured how to adventure in a place like the City. We could both sense that a new creative critical mass had been achieved, so I suppose it was only inevitable when roaring past the soybean fields of the Midwest, my friend asked me:
"So when do I get to play in this world again?"
I've been running a successful D&D campaign ever since, which is now in its 2nd year. This is not a solo adventure, however, but a game that we opened to an entire table of old friends and new. Now we are sharing this world we have built with some of the best gamers I know, and it only becomes a richer and more dynamic place with every session. My friend and I joke that the City has become so real to us that we fully expect to end up there when old age finally takes its toll and we lose our marbles, hence the title of this post (bonus points if you got the Muppet Movie reference). Personally, I could think of no better afterlife than this alternate reality I have labored over for pretty much my entire adult life. I wonder if this is how Tolkien or Asimov felt?
My friend Genie-- the one who taunts me about my Homeric odyssey of a commute-- issues a monthly writing challenge on her blog that she calls the Living Out Loud Project. Each month is a different theme, about which her readers are encouraged to write about in any way, shape, or form. The goal of Genie's project is to create a digital haven for self-expression:
Having attended many sessions atBlogHeror read online horror stories of people baring their souls and having the Internet collectively spit on them, I wanted to foster something positive from sharing a bit of ourselves.
In this month's challenge, "On Writing," Genie elaborates on the virtues of sharing what she calls 'the mundane magic of our everyday lives.' I agree with her that, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as too much information. What struck me most about this post, however, was her opening paragraph about how writing itself makes her feel:
I see my therapist Gary every other Friday. When I come in and sit down, he asks me how I’m doing. Not every visit, but many times the topic of my blogging comes up. I explain to him that the more I’m writing the better I feel. Gary is not a writer. He’s a good man and he’s clever and he has many interesting stories, but he is not a writer. He’s not a sharer. So when I say I feel better because I’ve been writing more, he just smiles politely.
I've already mentioned the fact that I've had something of an emotionally tumultuous year. Amid the rollercoaster of normal ups and downs, I have noticed something curious. On those days when I'm feeling my absolute worst, there is always one common denominator: I haven't written anything. At first I thought that this was correlation and not necessarily causation, but the closer I pay attention to this phenomenon the more I realize that it's legit.
Conversely, on the days when I have written something, I feel downright indestructible. I can't quite explain it, but if I've spent my morning commute lashing words together rather than noodling around with the MBTA's flaky wifi in order to surf the web or, even worse, attempt to answer some work email I get off the train with a bounce in my step and a twinkle in my eye. Writing makes me feel six inches taller, and I carry that positivity with me kicking and screaming into my workday so that even a bad day at work becomes a good day by default.
This was an important connection for me to make, and I'm glad I made it. Yet as I drifted through the doldrums after finishing my latest writing project-- Varonian Nights, the fantasy anthology I've been chipping away at for the past three years-- I realized something else. Writing is more than whatever work in progress it was that I was in the middle of. It is the very core of my being.
There is a fantastic scene in the movie Sideways where two characters-- Maya and Miles, played by Virginia Madsen and Paul Giamatti, respectively-- are talking about why they love wine so much. Maya launches into a beautiful explanation of the life, death, and afterlife of the grape and those who cultivated it, then concludes her encomium with what may perhaps be one of the sexiest lines ever delivered on the silver screen: "And it tastes so fucking good."
Writing is my wine. But all of this time when I should have been pouring my heart out, I've been bottling it up instead. Writing became divorced from the rest of my life and sequestered to an hour every weekday morning-- and only that if I was lucky and I didn't end up sitting next to a fellow commuter who had neglected to bring his or her own reading material and watched every single word I typed (at least give me a couple of bucks for entertaining you, willya?). While this hour was much more than I had ever been giving my writerly urges in a very long time, it wasn't enough.
Perhaps it is only now that I've found my voice as a librarian, just as my colleague Jessica Olin seems to have discovered hers after several years of listening, learning, and making those essential connections. I was quite the prolific LIS student blogger (chronicling my trials and tribulations as I worked my way through library school at The Library Ass), and although I fully expected that I would continue to write about my first year as a library professional-- working title: The Librarian: Year One-- the words just failed to materialize.
Now am I a bit older and wiser, and as I sit down at the keyboard I find I suddenly have an awful lot to say about a lot of things: about my vocation and its future, about writing... about life, the universe, and everything. So this is me, Living Out Loud at long last. I sure hope nobody shushes me!
Now that Pottermania has taken its final curtain call with the blockbuster release of Part Two of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I feel that I must finally reveal a dark secret which I have been harboring for all of these years:
I have never read any of the Harry Potter novels, nor have I seen any of the movies.
There, I said it. Though my Master's of Library Science may now be forfeit, and my fantasy street cred be dashed into a million tiny pieces, I can no longer live a lie. When you were geeking out over something Harry Potter-related and I was nodding enthusiastically and smiling, in reality I had no clue as to what you were talking about. Dumbledore? He was one of the good guys, right? And Voldemort was the Big Bad, I think. Aside from knowing the proper pronunciation of "Hermione," that's about all I've got.
Severus Snape? He might as well have been a Roman emperor, for all I know. And Quidditch makes about as much sense to me as baseball does to my Greek immigrant father-in-law.
Mind you, I'm not a fantasy snob, nor am I a hater due to J.K. Rowling's phenomenal rise to literary stardom. When Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone made its U.S. debut in 1998, I was in over my head with Real Life issues-- falling out of school (again) and falling in love (again). The only thing I was reading at the time was a dog-eared copy of Sophocles' Antigone, in Ancient Greek, which my soon-to-be wife and I would pretend to pore over between classes in a Boston University coffeeshop on a series of "study dates" before either of us put two and two together and realized that we should perhaps give actual dating a try as well.
Soon after that were days-long road trips off to romantic locales, a whirlwind engagement, and even a Big Fat Greek Wedding, but by then the Hogwarts Express had long since left the station. With the release of each successive book it occurred to me to try and catch up with the craze, but then I started writing again myself and I found myself feeling a bit protective of my own little patch of genre fantasy-- not only did I not want to lose my inspiration to write, which had returned at long last after more than a decade of silence, but I also was worried that I would unconsciously emulate any fantasy writers I was reading at the time.
So I maintained a respectful distance, smiling politely when people discussed the plot twists from the latest installment and trying not to lead on that I was a Harry Potter naif. Pretending in this manner got infinitely more difficult when I started library school, as it was almost a foregone conclusion that anyone who wanted to be a librarian would be ipso facto a J.K. Rowling devotee, but trying to explain how it could be that I-- an aspiring writer, librarian in training, and a fantasy buff no less!-- hadn't read so much as a page of a Harry Potter novel seemed so difficult at this point that I felt I had no choice but to commit myself to this "Talented Mr. Ripley"-style deception.
Time passed and before I knew it diehard fans were donning their wizard robes and gathering at midnight in front of their local bookstores in eager anticipation of the final volume in the series. In a sense this was a huge relief, as the topic of Harry Potter would now come up less and less often in casual conversation with friends and acquaintances, but at the same time I began to appreciate more fully exactly what it was that I had missed out over all of these years. Here was the cultural equivalent of the Star Wars phenomenon, only in literary form (!!!), and somehow I had allowed this to pass me by?
Mea culpa, my fellow librarians!
I remember feeling this way when Deathly Hallows was first published, and while I'm feeling shades of this sense of loss again with the end of the film franchise, this time around there is a glimmer of hope. My wife and I have been stockpiling the Harry Potter novels, you see, with the intention of reading them together along with our daughter Andriana. She's just at the right age now that I think she'll get a huge kick out of them, so even as the rest of the world's Pottermania is dying down, hers (and ours) may only just be winding up...
My friends often tease me about my commute, which is something of a doozy-- about 4 & 1/2 hours round-trip (and that's if I'm "lucky" and the MBTA gods do not compound insult with the injury of delayed an/or disabled trains). As I did my best to try and stay awake on this morning's ride into town my friend Genie couldn't help but comment:
"That would actually be my game plan if I had a commute like you do. I would get dressed, bring a pillow and go back to bed on the train."
While the thought of getting an extra hour or two of sleep in every day is tempting, the fact that I snore like a forest full of jumberjacks would probably result in my being 86ed from the train at the behest of my aggrieved fellow commuters by the end of the first week!
But it's not all bad. Unlike sitting in a car, where my options are listening to the radio, talking on the phone, or raging out on the jerk who just cut me off in traffic, traveling from Gloucester to Cambridge via public transit gives me a nice mix of long uninterrupted stretches of time and opportunities to stretch my legs and get some exercise.
I start my day by leaving the house around 7 o'clock AM and walking down Stacey Boulevard along Gloucester Harbor to the downtown commuter rail station, which is a smidgen over a mile away. Depending on the time of year and the weather there is almost infinite diversity in the views I get treated to every morning, so I always try to take a picture or two if I can capture one of the many familiar landmarks along the way in a new light. I also like to trade pictures of the sunrise with my dad, who takes morning walks of his own down at the Jersey Shore or at his winter digs on the Florida Panhandle.
With any luck I'll get to my train in time for its 7:34 departure and settle in for a little under an hour of writing time. I try to be as disciplined as possible about devoting the morning commute to writing, as I've always done my best writing when I'm still not quite awake enough to be too critical of my own creative efforts. Also, it's easier to secure a good seat for writing on the inbound trains, whereas the return trip is more or a crapshoot.
Assuming the train is on time, I will arrive at North Station in Boston a little after 8:30. At this point I have a choice-- jump on the Green Line to Park Street and switch to the Northbound Red Line for Harvard Square, or walk from the station up through Boston's former West End and catch the Red Line at the Charles/MGH stop. If the weather is even remotely nice I like to opt for the walk, which at 3/4's of a mile makes a decent counterpart to the first leg from my house to Gloucester Station. There's also no guarantee that taking the trolley to Park Street will save me any time, as I learn time and time again to my chagrin.
Whether I take both the Green and Red Lines or just the Red, the subway is my reading time. I've found that there's nothing better than taking advantage of the spare minutes of my day waiting for trains to arrive, depart, or sit on the tracks idling by reading. Most of the time I'm passing dead trees for Kindle editions, which I just find increasingly more convenient, especially in situations where I may not be carrying around my backpack but I do have my smartphone handy. I try to alternate my guilty pleasure fiction reads (Right Now: A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin) with some edifying nonfiction titles (Last Book Read: Reality Is Broken- Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal).
Finally I get to work, usually a bit past nine. Then I pretty much reverse the route around 5:15 or so, which usually gets me back to the homestead in Gloucester by half-past seven every evening. Fortunately I get a ride home from the commuter rail station, as my wife and daughter come to pick me up-- always a welcome sight for someone who's been gone for more than half the day at that point.
As I mentioned before I don't always get a chance to secure a nice quiet seat for writing on the train home, and most days of the week I'm usually still a little too wound up from work to manage any decent writing even if I do manage to score a good place to sit. What I usually do with the evening commute, then, is make sure that I haven't left any lingering problems or issues at work, answering what email I can using the commuter rail's crappy wifi, and then generally winding down so that when I do get home I can my family my undivided attention and not feel burdened by anything back at the office.
Well, there it is- how to make the most out of four-plus hours of captive time every day. It certainly doesn't work for everyone, but I think I've made it work for me... on most days, at least. There will always come a time in the summer (oh, say around now!) when I think of what else I could be doing with that lost 16% of my day and I start to feel a little caged in by my commute, but that's easily solved with the occasional "gone fishin'" day here or there...
Albert Einstein famously once said: "Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater." While I can't vouch for math, rest assured that there's someone out there with a more heinous commute than yours-- and that person is in all likelihood me.
Leave it to me to forget to mention that I finally finished Varonian Nights, the 11-part anthology which I've been pecking away at over the past three years. This means I have completed my third fantasy novel set in the same world as Confessions of a Gourmand (with a fourth, representing my 2009 NaNoWriMo, sort of kind of finished). However you slice it, we're looking at about half a million words written not only the same genre, but the same fictional universe.
I think I've earned a vacation.
While there's much editing to be done with the above items, followed by the release of some new Kindle editions, I am going to try returning to the "real" world and pick up where I had left off several years ago with my sordid semiautobiographical tale of sex, drugs, and collegiate acapella that I started after finishing Confessions and subsequently abandoned in order to do NaNo '06. It'll be interesting to see how five years of extra perspective will change the story, which is loosely based on my undergraduate years at MIT.
What does one pack on a writing holiday, I wonder?
Even though I didn't make the second cut in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest, just getting as far as I did has inspired me to sell Confessions of a Gourmand as a Kindle edition at Amazon.com.
I'll be working on some print options as well, either at Createspace or Lulu. But in the meantime, if you've enjoyed reading the blog version of the novel, I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd consider recommending the Kindle edition to others or posting a review on the Amazon site.
