I’ve been writing a lot about the act of coming out of a funk. My book On Being (And Becoming Again!) A Writer was all about that, and if you’re in my sphere, you’d probably have to be living under a rock to have not heard me say something about it.
I mean.
I may be bad at marketing, but not that bad.
The book’s Kickstarter closed a week or so ago, and now it’s exclusively available in a cool StoryBundle along with several other outstanding books about writing and the writing life. StoryBundles are so much fun, both for the company I get to keep and because I like the idea that readers being able to adjust their pay scale and donate to a great charity. If Kickstarter isn’t your thing, here’s another chance to grab a copy before it goes to the Amazons and other wide distributors of the world.
Anyway, it strikes me that what I’m not doing very well is talking about what I’m doing now. Which is, as is normal for me, juggling writing time with business operations.
When I’m at my best, I’m generally slotting raw creativity into my morning slots, and then spending what time I have in the afternoon or evening doing all the other things it takes to be me.
That’s almost where I’m at today.
So, let’s talk about that creativity bit today, all right?
Cutting to the chase, I’m working to finish the fourth book in the Cruise Brothers series—which is a world I created along with my brother, Jeff, a professional musician in LA. Gabble Ratchet, his Genesis tribute band, draws quite the crowd.
I’m excited by the book at this point, which is exactly how I want to feel about it.
I wrote the first draft a few months ago, but it’s one of those things that I’ve talked about before when I said the spark wasn’t there. I knew I needed to come back to it later.
A Cruise Brothers book, you see, has to be presented with a sassy combination of the obliviously dashing and the insanely silly. That was a hard mindset for me at the time.
If you’ve read them, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, well … get thee hence to skyfoxpublishing.com and grab “The Intergalactic Band of Brilliance,” which is the origin short story. The audio versions include Jeff’s music and our own narration.
They are pure fun.
In hindsight, it makes sense that I was struggling. Now that I’m feeling stronger, it’s been much easier.
During the rewrite, I’ve mostly been letting the characters character, which helps me feel a lot more of the “fun” part of playing than the “work” part of competing (as in, competing with myself to make the work good). I find myself chuckling at jokes, and grinning slyly at the in-parts that I’m embedding inside the text. “In-parts” meaning that they work in the story but will make those in the know grin, too.
IYKYK only works in stories if they are well-positioned, I think, and that challenge is fun, too.
An example of this comes in a passage like this:
Frisky sat up with a regal sense of being taller.
He glared down at the boys, who sat in the scrum of crewmembers below, the golden-blond shocks of their hair making them stand out. The Moore Brothers. James and Lyn. The Intergalactic Band of Brilliance. His back-up band. Again.
Hehe.
They might be dopes, but they were his dopes.
Those of you who know the Cruise Brothers world know that Frisky is an intelligent cat who has been through wacky machinations that now allow him to speak. He gets a POV in the work, hence the passage above. I like this passage for its basic block and tackling, but, for purposes of giving you a glimpse of inside baseball, I’ll say that the use of “regal sense” was added in this pass, and that the small physical description of the boys was brought up from a passage that was originally later on in the chapter.
But the real piece that I’ve added here is that line: “They might be dopes, but they were his dopes.”
It completely works in the flow. I find it fun to read, and it’s a classic dig at the boys that also conveys Frisky’s loyalty to them. That’s all great. No one is going to take that as an in-joke. No one is going to scratch their heads at it. But it makes me smile because it reminds me of my uncle, who passed years ago. Dennis was an interesting guy. He was closer in age to me than he was to his own brother, my dad. He had a sharp sense of humor that meshed irony and sarcasm in equal parts—and then added a truly pointed intelligence to it. There’s a lot of Dennis in Frisky, I think, though I hadn’t really meant there to be.
Anyway, that phrase, “he might be a dope, but he’s my dope,” is a thing Dennis would say.
To be fair, I may be the only person alive right now who would see it as an in-joke. I’ll have to ask Jeff. But it makes the internal me happy when I see it.
So, yeah.
That’s how things are going for me right now.
I’m coming to the page most every day, and finding myself happy with getting things done.
I hope nothing but the same for you!
