Tag: IWSG

IWSG, January 2023: The Word of the Year

John Winkelman

Poe (left) and Pepper eyeballing each other

The week before Christmas I was struck down by the flu. I worked from home for that week, and just when I started to feel better the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2022 covered West Michigan with a ridiculous amount of snow. Throughout these two weeks of isolation, Poe and Pepper (pictured above) were a wonderful source of amusement and affection for Zyra and I.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for January 2023 is:

Do you have a word of the year? Is there one word that sums up what you need to work on or change in the coming year?

For this year, I think my word will be Attentiveness. That point where attention meets engagement. I had little enough of either over the past (checks notes) five years, since I went on hiatus from Caffeinated Press at the beginning of 2018. The last three years have been a fugue of reacting to or recovering from outside world events. Now that we are through the holidays and already the daylight hours are growing noticeably longer, I feel a renewed energy.

Attentiveness, to me, means not just noticing the parts of my life which need attention, but then doing something about it. Whether it be my relationship with my partner, my health, the martial arts class, my family, my writing, our house, or anything else in my life, I think I am ready to re-enter the world and take care of the things which need taking care of.

 

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IWSG, December 2022: Holiday Writing

John Winkelman

Poe hiding from loud noises.

[EDIT – didn’t actually write the post before its scheduled publication time. That has been corrected.]

The past several weeks have been busy, thanks to NaNoWriMo, work, family obligations, and planning house upgrades. Thus a short IWSG post for the month.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for December 2022 is: It’s holiday time! Are the holidays a time to catch up or fall behind on writer goals?

In past years I would have said holidays are when I fall behind, even though I have vacation time, but this year I think I might put that down time to good use. This is mostly because I have an actual plan and an actual draft to work on, with an actual end goal in sight. This is seldom the case at the end of the year. That, more than anything else, tends to drive whether or not I actually sit down and do the work.

 

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IWSG, November 2022: NaNo Or No NaNo?

John Winkelman

At this point NaNoWriMo 2022 has been in full swing for a little over 24 hours. I am a couple of thousand words into my story for the year, and enjoying the process immensely. But that means that I have little time for a long, detailed blog post. That being said…

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for November 2022 is:

November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not?

This is my tenth year participating in NaNoWriMo, and I have loved the experience throughout, even in those years where I didn’t get to 50,000 words. I recommend that everyone try it at least once.

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IWSG, October 2022: The Best Characteristics of a Genre

John Winkelman

Grand Rapids skyline from the 10th floor of the county court building

September 2022 was one of the busiest months I can remember of the past several years. Weddings, work, Zyra’s business, and late summer chores, errands and spontaneous events have left little time for writing. Fortunately, most of the business and busy-ness is behind me now, so I can get back to planning my November project.

It’s the first Wednesday of October, which means that it’s time for the new Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s IWSG question is:

What do you consider the best characteristics of your favorite genre?

This is an interesting question, as it forces me, for the sake of this article, to choose a favorite genre. And that is…complicated. Looking at my bookshelf, I have roughly equal numbers of fantasy, science fiction, poetry and literary fiction. In each category I have my favorite authors, and my favorite books, which were not necessarily written by my favorite authors.

The books I find most compelling are those which sit in between more established genres, which are sometimes labeled as “magic realism,” or “slipstream,” or “the New Weird.” If the sense is closer to science fiction these are sometimes labeled as “cyberpunk.”

So I guess my favorite genre is whatever you call it when everything seems like it should be the current world, but things are just a little…off. Or maybe a lot off, but the off-ness starts out small. “This, only more-so.” Reducto not quite all the way to absurdum. For instance, William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition,  Michelle Tea‘s Black Wave, Rita Indiana‘s Tentacle, or The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols. A case could also be made for Neal Stephenson‘s Baroque Trilogy. My current favorite of these fictions is Kim Stanley Robinson‘s The Ministry for the Future, which at this point feels more like precognition than speculation.

What I like about this very loosely-defined genre is that it allows us to explore riffs on the real world without changing the fundamental nature of the world. It’s less “What if magic existed?” and more of “What if Aunt Maggie could do magic?” What if cryptocurrency was treated like a currency instead of like a commodity? What if laws were ACTUALLY enforced equally across all regions, races, classes and genders? What if California seceded? What if all of Christianity were reduced down to the Golden Rule? What if someone developed a gene therapy which reduced the amount of sleep necessary down to one hour in 24?

This approach to storytelling can also accommodate changes in scope or scale. For instance, what if the War of the Roses, instead of being transposed to Westeros, took place in an apartment building in Dayton, Ohio? Or what if a couple of spoiled, entitled toddlers were fighting over who got the best toys, except it was expanded to a global scope and titled “All conflicts in the world where monied interests profit off of the misery of the downtrodden?”

(See? The stories we tell about ourselves CAN influence the world around us!)

Stories which explore the ramifications and outcomes of these subtle tweaks to the existing reality can be important cultural touchstones, and useful for driving the collective imagination.

How about you-all? What are the best facets of your favorite genre?

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IWSG, September 2022: The Worst Genre (for me to write in)

John Winkelman

So here we are at the end of the first week of September and my writing continues to be mostly journaling and the occasional edit of an old poem. Whereas in 2020 and 2021 I had time to write, but no energy, here in 2022 I have the energy, but no time. Al of the things we couldn’t do in the previous two years – all of the socializing, visiting, vacationing, partying, monstering, family events, etc., which were blocked by COVID restrictions and common sense, are no longer blocked by COVID restrictions. Every week there are more opportunities to meet with other human beings, face to face.

To sum up, this has been an exhausting summer.

On a lighter note, today is the first Wednesday of September, and that means it’s blog hop time! This month’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group question is:

What genre would be the worst one for you to tackle and why?

Short answer: Inspirational fiction.

Long answer:

Back in the 1990s I worked at a local independent bookstore. We had an excellent selection of books, though as with all brick-and-mortar stores, we had limited shelf space. Thus is was that philosophy, religious texts, and inspirational literature were all shelved in the same area of the store.

This being West Michigan, the inspirational literature, which was 100% Christian, took up more shelf space than religion and philosophy combined. And oh, the titles we carried. And oh, the customers who bought them.

What were the books like? Without going into too much egregious detail, Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels were among the best of them. While most weren’t as gleefully sadistic toward non-Christians as were LaHaye’s books, they were all tiresome, predictable, and not at all challenging to the reader. The very best of them (which, again, weren’t very good) invited the reader to a sort of self-reflection, as long as that self-reflection guided the reader to the Great Attractor of whichever sect of Christianity the author belonged. And invariably, more conservative, the better.

At the risk of looking like I am lumping every book in the genre of inspirational fiction into an undifferentiated mass, I agree that, for the purposes of this unapologetically subjective post, this is indeed the case. I allow that I am definitely not part of the target audience, so there may be nuances in the outer fringes of the genre which I have not encountered.

With that groundwork, what follows is the reason why I should not write in the Inspirational Literature genre.

I have had a running joke that for me, writing literary fiction is a doomed endeavor because at some point, despite my best efforts, Cthulhu shows up. When the Great Old Ones are concerned, the stories all end in madness, nihilism, and the inevitable destruction of the world and all the works of mankind. This opens the possibility that the books I might write would be mistaken for Christian-based inspirational literature, a la LaHaye. Just with, you know, the awakening of Cthulhu swapped in for the End Times/Second Coming. And at that point, really, what’s the difference?

However: Were I to write some inspirational fiction, and allowing for the inevitable drift in my writing into the cyclopean and squamous, I would keep the scope small and intimate, and focus specifically on people in the myriad out-groups who invariably bear the brunt of the decisions of those in the in-group. The world has never not been apocalyptic for one group or another, and the most inspirational stories are those which uplift the downtrodden without requiring them to either lick or don their oppressor’s boots.

(And yes, I know that not all inspirational literature involves the Apocalypse. Just the most popular works of the genre.)

(And lest ye comment that the Left Behind series is not “inspirational”, I invite you to take a good hard look at the messaging therein, and the target audience thereof.)

(Come to think of it, maybe LaHay’s books are more expirational than inspirational.)

Anyway, thanks for reading! This was a fun post.

 

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IWSG, August 2022: Originality or Not?

John Winkelman

I don’t know how it’s been for you-all, but this past month was CRAZY busy here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. With most COVID restrictions lifted, the whole world is trying to make up for two years of lost time, and instead of having nothing to do on a given day it seems we have EVERYTHING to do. And, of course, not enough time in which to do it.

For me, this also this applied to my writing. All of my summer plans have fallen by the wayside, other than the ninety minutes, one Tuesday a month, where I attend an open mic night. And even that feels like something I have to squeeze in. And I am not always successful.

I thought I had mostly outgrown FOMO, but it seems to have metastasized in the zeitgeist.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2022 is: When you set out to write a story, do you try to be more original or do you try to give readers what they want?

This is an odd question to answer. Outside of this blog, I don’t have any readers to speak of. Therefore I don’t have anyone to whom to cater. And I don’t necessarily try to be original, though I don’t think I write quite like anyone I have read, so I suppose that is a form of originality, even if not entirely intentional. None of my manuscripts are similar to each other, either short or long form. Even the 2021 bio-punk sequel to my partially completed 2020 salvage-punk book is distinct enough that I now need to go back and re-write part 1.

So it goes.

 

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IWSG, July 2022: Where Would I Live?

John Winkelman

A Curious Chipmunk

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. Life has been hectic and crazy, so I have not written a lot since the last IWSG back at the beginning of June.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for July 2022 is:

If you could live in any book world, which one would you choose?

The easy answer, and therefore the answer I am going with here, is the world of Amber, from Roger Zelazny‘s Amber Chronicles. This is because by its very nature the world (or more accurately, multiverse) of Amber contains all possible other worlds. Were I of the royal blood of Amber (and really, how could I not be?) I would be able to, after certain trials and tests, travel to any world that I desired, simply by picturing that world in my head and then going for a walk.

With the easy answer out of the way, let’s look at some other possibilities.

I have read huge stacks of fiction over the past 40+ years. With few exceptions, none of the worlds therein are worlds I would like to live in, no matter how compelling the world-building.

For instance, Bas-Lag from China Mieville‘s books Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The Iron Council. Beautifully rendered, exquisite worldbuilding, richly detailed, and full of horrors (slake moths, the Malarial Queendom, and the Remade, to name a few) like I have seldom encountered elsewhere.

Tolkein’s Middle Earth is a possibility, but the realities of living in a pre-industrial society just don’t appeal to me.

The world Susanna Clarke created in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has potential, but then I think of all of the horrors of the twentieth century (and also the 21st!) and add magic to the mix, and I don’t see it being anything other than unimaginably worse than what the mundane world has seen in the past hundred-plus years.

And I suppose that is a good reason for the ambiguity of the answers: a heroic story exists in a world where heroes are needed, and such worlds tend to be terrible for all but the most privileged, who themselves are usually the reason heroes are needed in the first place.

Even the world of Amber is not immune to these issues. The protagonist is a prince and potential heir to the throne, and is himself the cause of much suffering across the multiverse in his quest for revenge. That he is the hero of the story doesn’t mean he is a Good Guy, and as some of the revisionist super-hero comics of the last decade have demonstrated, when heroes and villains clash, the collateral damage can be massive.

Moving into mainstream and literary fiction would bring us into the present world perhaps at a single remove or enhanced in some subtle ways. Bruce Sterling coined the term “now-punk” to refer to any fiction written about the contemporary world, e.g. a story about the world in 2022 which is written in 2022. I would add a secondary definition to now-punk which is “reality, only moreso.” And an amped-up reality has been the base state of reality for about the past twenty years, and even more over the past five, so by any honest measure we are currently living in a cyberpunk dystopia.

So all that being said, I will stick with my original answer of living in the Amber universe, with the possibility of taking a walk to any other world I can conceive of, if only for a short vacation.

I understand Arrakis is beautiful this time of year.

(So with all that being said, where would you like to live, or visit, or avoid at all costs?)

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IWSG, May 2022

John Winkelman

Hello, writing community! Welcome to May, which seemed to appear out of nowhere. Then again, the first two days of May have been overcast, rainy and cold, so it’s like April never left. Or March, for that matter. Then again, the COVID pandemic is still kind of hanging in there, which means today (Wednesday, IWSG day) is March 794, 2020.

Anyway.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2022 is:

It’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times. What are your writer highs (the good times)? And what are your writer lows (the crappy times)?

My writer highs come from being in the zone, or in the flow, as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. There are moments in the mornings when I can knock two concepts against each other in my head and from the interaction and intersection of these agents I can pull a page or so of short story, or a new scene for a novel, or the seed of a poem. These moments never seem to be predictable, but they always seem to happen within the first few minutes of a writing session. Which is to say, if I make it more than a few minutes into a writing session, that is the time when I am most likely to achieve the flow state and in that moment I am no longer writing, I am transcribing. I feel like I am in harmony with the world and the words are writing themselves.

The lows are the mornings when I am sleep deprived and still burned out from the day before, and my pen seems too heavy to hold, and someone broke into my house and rearranged all of the keys on my laptop. Or so it seems while in the grip of the ennui which is so easy to fall into and so difficult to pull myself out of. I’m feeling a touch of it right now, coming after a month full of reading and writing poetry, and attending poetry events and talking to poets. I should feel great, but instead I feel friction. I want to write, but I don’t want to write. And petulance looks silly on someone in their mid-fifties.

So the only thing to do is endure the down-times and have faith that the good times will appear again, hopefully soon, and I will be able to get back into the zone.

 

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IWSG, April 2022

John Winkelman

It’s not that March was objectively longer than either of the previous two Marches, but it was around this time two years ago that the lockdowns began, and now that restrictions have eased considerably from even a year ago, the stress levels are much reduced, and that leaves more energy for creative endeavors.

This month’s Insecure Writers Support Group question is:

Have any of your books been made into audio books? If so, what is the main challenge in producing an audiobook?

I have not yet published any books, so the simple answer is…No.

But I have friends who have published books in both print and audio book version. Dyrk Ashton, in particular, who is a friend I met at ConFusion several years ago. He is the author of the most excellent Paternus Trilogy, of which all three are available in audiobook format. Dyrk is part of the Wizards, Warriors and Words fantasy-writing advice podcast, which recently released an episode about creating audio books for self-published authors.

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IWSG, March 2022

John Winkelman

Riverside Park in Grand Rapids Michigan

Hi everyone. I missed last month’s IWSG post due to a combination of *multiple vague gestures at the state of the world*. I’m sure you can relate.

This month’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group question is:

Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

Much of what I write is in response to calls for submission to anthologies and themed issues of various literary and genre fiction magazines. I seldom complete those stories in time to meet the deadline, but even when it is obvious that the work will take months longer than originally estimated, I try to keep to the original theme. Constraints, I have heard, breed innovation.

But when writing to a theme, particularly if it is a type of story I have not written before, I sometimes find myself asking the question, “Did I put that thing I wrote into the story because the story demands it, or because the constraints of the theme demand it?” This can be a difficult knot to untangle.

Here is an example:

A few years ago, World Weaver Press put out a call for new interpretations of the Baba Yaga myth, for their anthology Skull and Pestle. My degree is in Russian Studies, and I have been to Russia, and continue to read Russian literature (in translation only; my language skills are quite rusty), so this seemed like a perfect fit.

I set the story in a village of Russian Orthodox Old Believers in northern Minnesota, near the Canadian border. The writing went well, with (I thought) good characters, good dialog, and good pacing, but when it came time to include Baba Yaga, I found that I couldn’t quite fit her into the story in a way that felt convincing. I went back and re-wrote the first third of the story (which kept getting longer), and by the time I found a way to transplant Baba Yaga from the forests of western Russia to the plains of the American Midwest, the deadline had long passed, and the short story had become a novella.

The troublesome scene, which would have brought Baba Yaga into prominence, was an act of bigoted violence against the Old Believers which, while all too plausible, felt gratuitous. Yet I couldn’t find a way through to the final act without that scene or something like it. So I left the scene in and re-wrote almost everything before it. Having done that, I found I needed to go a completely different direction with the last part of the story, and that is why it is still not finished.

Skull and Pestle is available here, and is quite good. I think all of the stories in it are better than whatever final form my own story would have taken, had I completed it in time to meet the deadline.

On a side note, I want to thank all of the members of the IWSG for your support and encouragement as  I round out my first year in this group. It has been difficult to stay motivated during the pandemic, and being part of this writing group has been a big help. In particular I want to thank Jean Davis for bringing the IWSG to my attention. You rock!

 

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