Why Am I Still Writing?

 

Greetings, Fair Reader.

 

I'm making some progress on the book and also focusing on art and organization at the same time. I finally broke down and ordered the Lexington cart (in blush) from Michael's, and I'm using it mainly for my watercolor materials. I have another cart that I have to put together. It has 5 drawers, although I wish I had gotten the 32" version. There are a couple of more pieces that I need to get and a few things to get rid of in order to make everything work. Hopefully, those will be the answers to my disorganized art room.

 

Meanwhile, I'm trying NOT to binge on Yellowstone, and I just started Season 3. I finished Dark Winds, which is an AMC series based on Tony Hillerman's books about the Navajo. Several years ago, I watched the PBS miniseries that combined his books Skinwalkers, Coyote Waits, and A Thief of Time. They kind of remind me of Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour, which is centered around the Anasazi civilization who vanished after inhabiting the Southwest for about 1,000 years. If you're interested in the mystery of the Anasazi, here's an NPR article about it, and here is a YouTube video by Hill People Gear where a group of fans of the book went to explore the area, called "In the field: Haunted Mesa Overland." Beautiful country.

 

My dad introduced me to Haunted Mesa, and I have to say it's the only Louis L'Amour book that I have read, but I did really enjoy it. It's amazing that there is NO MOVIE based on this book. Hint! Hint!

 

There were some differences in the characters between Dark Winds and the PBS miniseries. In the PBS version, the older detective Leaphorn had returned to the reservation after working in a major city (DC?) for years, and Chee was the younger detective on the reservation who was in training to become a shaman. Leaphorn is a non-believer in superstition, and Chee looks at all of the crimes through the lens of a believer. In Dark Winds, Leaphorn has remained on the reservation, and Chee is actually an FBI agent claiming that he wants to be placed elsewhere but it only working the case on the reservation as a favor to his superior. Chee was raised on the reservation, but he and his mother moved away after she was accused of being a witch. He is more of a "realist." Despite the character differences, the story is still compelling and mixes crime solving with some magic elements. Dark Winds is set in the late 70s and features all of those fun vintage elements from the metal kitchen chairs with vinyl padded seats to the first push-button phones.

I have watched a couple of episodes of The Last of Us, which seems interesting. I tried The Mayfair Witches on AMC. How do I put this delicately? It doesn't feel like Anne Rice wrote the script. Like, you can watch A Game of Thrones and get a feel for the mind of George R.R. Martin (except the last season—nobody can explain that at all). Same with Tolkien movies. You get a feel for who the author was. When you can take a book, make a movie or series out of it, and have no feel for the story's creator at all, it feels like you missed something. Anne Rice was a literary author, just like Alice Hoffman who wrote Practical Magic. Whereas the movie Practical Magic was a good translation of the book, I feel like the screenwriters and directors of TMW missed something. I noticed that Anne's name is listed as a producer, but I don't know how much she was involved in the actual creation of the series. They also did away with several main characters, but that was not the main crime, in my opinion. In a list of reviews that I found, most people who read the books gave the series one star, although my reasons are more about how the story is told than character changes.

 

So, I've been working on writing the second book in my Gnome series for a long time. Some of you may wonder why I'm still trying to finish this? Why do I even care?

In my defense, it took a long time for the first book and the one after that, too. They were published a little over a year apart, but both had been in the works for a long time. So, the length of time may not be apparent to others. I know I could have finished this one a lot sooner. At the same time, I feel like the stories need time to "cure." The book that I finish never looks exactly like the one I started. Often, there are major changes in plots, characters, etc. I've learned to be patient and to give the story time to reveal itself. If I rush to a pre-planned ending, it probably will not be the right story.

There is a lot of pressure for writers today to put out new content continuously and rapidly, whereas, looking back at classic writers, many had fairly short bibliographies. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind, claimed to have only one book in her. She'd said all she had to say in that one book.

In one of my favorite movies, Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas plays aging English Professor Grady Tripp, who was greatly esteemed for his first book, and he had spent years struggling with a follow-up. The movie has a Big Chill vibe to it, and includes Robert Downey Jr, Toby Maquire, Katie Holmes, Frances McDormand, and Richard Thomas. When his editor, played by Robert Downey Jr, comes to town to put pressure on him about the book, which is an ever-growing document that stands about a foot tall on Grady's desk, basically, Grady's life has already begun to unravel. I thought it was hilarious and one of the best academia-related movies in existence. Amazingly, few people have even heard of it.

I can totally relate to Grady, although maybe not the highly-esteemed part nor the recreational drug use. At the time I'm writing this, I have just surpassed 124,000 words, and the whole story hasn't been told yet. There are several place-holder chapters. You know....

Chapter Fifty-Two

(Insert Chapter-Fifty Two Here)

I realize that some of what I write will be pruned away. Sometimes, I put something in, then take it out again. Although the beginning is far more polished, and a lot of the ending hasn't even been written yet, nothing so far is set in stone. So, this word count may go down again (and up... and down... and up...).

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about why I keep writing, and the reason is pretty simple. I do it to stay sane. Okay, maybe I should say to help hang onto the few remaining threads of sanity that I claim to possess. I write to entertain myself and to escape the "real world." If no one else ever read a word I wrote or published, I would continue to do so. It gives me a place to reflect and try on different ideas. Simply going through the process of choosing words and refining them is like a meditative process and helps me to remember things better.

You may have heard of writers who use a template, which many do these days. I don't use a template, so my process is much more organic (i.e., if I mess up, I'm on my own 😹). I have tried to use one in the past, but it just wasn't working. If someone who believes strongly in the template format reads my stuff, they will think I don't know what I'm doing because I didn't follow the pattern. The template does seem to be more for commercial-style writing, and I've been told that I'm about 50/50 between literary and commercial, so perhaps that's why it's not working for me.

Just in case this sounds like I'm being all superior, I am not the best writer. I think my writing has its moments, and then there are areas that might not feel as strong. I make mistakes as both a human being and as a writer. I go over the story and reread and rewrite and do it all over again, trying to make it better and trying to get a little further along with each pass before I go back to the beginning. It's never going to be highly esteemed. I write fantasy, fairy tales, and about supernatural creatures. I doubt my werewolves are going to be considered profound material, although I do insert thoughtful nuggets here and there. I'm not hung up on desiring fame or immense wealth and trying to create a book that will get me all kinds of awards. In fact, I'd prefer to remain private as much as possible.

Writing provides me with a problem to mull over, but it's a "safe" problem that has no lasting impact on my real life. I have terrible insomnia, and I can choose a problem in the book that I am working on and try to solve it. This is often how I fall asleep at night. Usually, I fall asleep before I solve it, but the solution pops up later on. Still, it's a nice sleep tactic.

I never want for my writing to become a chore. When I find something "boring," it's my sign that I've missed something, and I need to rewrite it. I don't want to be so hung up on success and sales that I forget that I enjoy writing. So, while I have published books and am an author, I find it beneficial to think of myself as a writer and to once again try to become the person who first learned to love reading and desired to become a writer. It's just a little mental shift, an angle that starts small, but can be infinitely larger at the other end. While most writers hope to eventually obtain status as an author, that status comes with its own pressures, which can make you forget why you wanted to do it in the first place. If I'm stressed out writing about werewolves, I'm most likely doing something wrong.

As a part of my campaign to not take myself so seriously, I hope to be sharing more thoughts on writing while I'm finishing this book (and the oodles of other stories in the works) and how I write (without using a template) in the future.