Richard Dansky

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

In order to become a successful writer, you need to blog and tweet relentlessly. Or maybe you need to not be distracted by social media, and focus exclusively on your writing. You need to give your stuff away online in podcast and PDF format to spread word so people will pick up the hardcopy or ebook. You also need to not give your work away for free or do things “for the exposure”, because that’s not professional. The way to write is to write endlessly on your own to hone your craft. The way to write is to go the workshop route. The way to write is to get into the University of Iowa. The way to write is to get Oprah to embarrass you on national television, then lowball NYU undergraduates into doing exactly the sort of crap that people used to claim Stephen King did with his army of chained writers.

You get the idea.

At last check, the internet was 34% Nigerian phishing scams, 26% porn, 18% political screaming, 14% cute cat videos, 6% sports, and 2% writing advice. In other words, a significant chunk of the verbiage slung online on twitter, on webpages, in magazines, and on blogs (like, say, this one) is dedicated to telling you how to write better. My Twitter feed features at least a half dozen “Here’s my new article on writing!” tweets per day, which still puts it behind the horoscope retweets but ain’t chopped liver, either. And that’s every day.

All of which means that there is an obscene amount of writing advice out there for you to take to heart in order to achieve massive literary success. Of course, the fact that much of this advice is mutually contradictory gets conveniently ignored in conversations like this, and if you tried to follow all the advice out there you’d rapidly explode from the sheer impossibility of it all. It doesn’t help that much of the writing advice out there is absolutely well-intentioned and drawn from personal experience. When Mur Lafferty or Chuck Wendig or Joe Konrath tells you something about how they’ve made a particular approach work for them, it’s because that approach worked for them. They’re not trying to fool, or scam, or confuse you. (Other folks might be, but they’re not.) They’re hard-working, successful pros who are honestly trying to share their knowledge.

But bearing in mind that this is all done with the best of intentions, that can still leave the reader of writing-related material – that is to say, you – wondering what the hell to do next. Because there IS a lot of advice out there, and a surfeit is as bad as none at all. Too many options can paralyze you as surely as no options.

So here’s my advice, because all that’s really needed is a little more, right?

It comes in two parts.

One, the only surefire key to success in writing you’re going to find online is “Keep writing.” (There’s a second one, “Be Neil Gaiman”, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Two, the best thing you can do with this tsunami of writing advice is to look at it, to understand what it’s actually suggesting you do, and then look at yourself. Figure out what you’ve got the time and the inclination and the bandwidth to do. Don’t adopt a strategy that calls for a massive, constant online presence if you’re not interested in blogging every day, if you’re not interested in engaging others on Twitter and in comments sections on blogs, and so forth. Doing so – and then failing miserably at it because you couldn’t or didn’t want to do the things that particular bit of advice called for is a lot like bitching that you didn’t lose weight just because you bought a gym membership. Similarly, if you know you do like puttering around online, picking the Salinger Hermit Method For Success As A Writer is going to fail you miserably.

And I can hear someone out there getting to this point in the essay and freaking out: “Oh my God! He’s giving writing advice that says you can’t take writing advice!”

Which, apart from the horrifying spectacle of the moaning and geshrying and everything else, is wrong. It’s also not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that before you can figure out whose techniques work for you and which approaches you should follow, you first need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Figure out what kind of writer you are. Figure out how much effort you’re actually willing to put into writing, and into the things around writing, and which things you’re more likely to do than others. In other words, do your research on the most important resource for your writing: yourself.

Then and only then, once you’ve looked yourself in the eye and said, “OK, I’m not willing to get up at 5 every morning to write but I can do a blog post a day and hit five conventions a year,” then you can start looking for folks who seem to match your level and style of commitment, and see what they’ve done to achieve success.

Crazy, I know. But it’s so crazy it just might work.

Dear readers, writers, and fellow nerds of all stripes, I feel I must unburden myself to you of a terrible, profound, shocking secret that, over the course of my professional and personal journey, I have uncovered.

Pay attention. This is important.

There is a lot of entertainment out there. And one of the inevitable consequences of there being so much out there is that different people like different things. And this is fine.

Or, to put it another way, there are things that you like that I don’t like. There are things that I like that you don’t like. There are things out there that we both like, and things that neither of us like. There are things you like a lot that I kind of enjoy, and things that I’m fanatical about that you can only enjoy in small doses.

And again, this is fine. When I say, “I do not like this thing you like,” I am merely stating a personal preference. I am not making a value judgment on you as a human being based on the fact that your love for Dollhouse is probably far greater than mine. I do not cast you out from the charmed circle of those I bless with my presence because you do not give a rat’s ass over whether the 12” remix of Marillion’s “Assassing” is superior to, inferior to, or simply different[1] than the album and single mixes. I actually enjoy conversing at levels below 100 decibels with people whose taste differs from mine because exploring what each of us likes or does not like about Joss Whedon’s latest project can lead to some very interesting discussion. This, in my opinion is a good thing.[2]

However, and I may be getting silly here, I expect the same of you. I would hope that you would understand that others’ tastes are not precisely congruent to your own, and that by going on fanatical crusades across the internet to flame at the stake the heretics who did not show sufficient love for Firefly or John Scalzi’s latest book or whatnot, you look like jerks, and make actual interesting discussion beyond “I LURV THIS SO MUCH” pretty much impossible.

By the same token, exploding into wrathful condescension against those who like stuff that you do not like – particularly things that fall into the category of Things That Sold Better Than Things I Like And Which Are Liked By Many Other People – at the drop of a hat is also counterproductive to anything except the reinforcement of a particularly weird and defensive tribal mindset. This siege mentality, which can best be summed up as “Everyone out there likes crap and I like the good stuff” is magnificent at driving off people who might actually have been interested in trying the stuff you’d like had it been offered in a friendly, accessible and non-fanatical way.

It also, once liquor gets into the equation, turns parties boring as hell, because there’s always some drunk asshole in the corner declaiming loudly about how Twilight[3] is actually a sign of the oncoming zombie apocalypse. Said asshole used to hole up in the same corner ranting about how The Wheel of Time was the end of literacy, and before that The Belgariad, and before that D&D tie-in novels, and before that, all the way back to Seabury Quinn (with a side trip circa 1984 into “U2 sold out, man, and now their music sucks!”), but never mind. Not important[4]. What is important is that you scratch that loudly voiced concern lightly and you get a highly counterproductive mix of clannishness and snobbery and jealousy, which A)doesn’t discourage a single 12 year old girl from buying a poster of Taylor Lautner flashing his abs and B)makes people actively want to avoid the stuff you’re holding out as brilliant. Why? Because you’ve already told them that the stuff they like is crap, and that’s not a good indicator that your tastes are then magically going to align once you force them to watch YouTube clips of the best moments from Warehouse 13[5].

So, in short: relax. Or calm the fuck down. Whichever. Unhitch your self-esteem from your entertainment choices and just enjoy them for a change. And while you’re at it, allow others to enjoy theirs as well. Then, if you’re really feeling crazy, you can sit down and talk about what you liked/didn’t like and maybe be glad that other folks are getting enjoyment from what they read, or watch, or listen to. Understand that no one is secretly judging you and finding you wanting because you liked Patrick Rothfuss more than you liked Tolkien. And understand that the person you talked to who couldn’t give a crap about what happens next to Kvothe is not a bad person because of their withholding of that metaphorical lump of kaka. If you can talk using a noun-to-expletive ratio of better than 3:1 about why Brandon Sanderson’s latest slab[6] of heroic fantasy didn’t do it for you with someone who did like the book, great. Maybe they can talk about why they did like it, and everyone walks away from the conversation a little happier. At the very least, you’ll be able to be slightly more accurate in your holiday shopping for one another[7].

But as for me, I liked Rubicon more than I’m liking The Walking Dead so far. I preferred Millennium to The X-Files. I don’t listen to a ton of MC Frontalot or Dresden Dolls or J-pop. I think Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora is the most enjoyable fantasy novel I’ve read in years, that James Knapp’s The Silent Army is the most interesting zombie novel I’ve read lately, and that Jeff Strand is someone more people should be reading. I’m mildly amused by The Guild, I don’t read Wil Wheaton’s blog on a regular basis, and I’m more interested in Keith Law’s take on books than I am in that of most genre reviewers.

These are my opinions. Having them does not make me a bad person[8]. By the same token, I would not consider you to be a bad person if you held opinions counter to mine.  And if you could do me – and everyone else whose tastes aren’t precisely identical to yours – the same courtesy, then maybe we’ll all be a little happier. At the very least, we’ll all have a lot more time for reading.

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[1] For the record, the album version rules.

[2] It has been scientifically proven that the only entertainment choice all sentient life-forms can actually agree on is Law & Order reruns, which everyone agrees are OK for background noise if there’s nothing else on.

[3] For the record: I have never read a Twilight novel. I probably never will read one. I don’t find the premise interesting. Do not mistake the referenced paragraph as an endorsement of, commentary on, or judgment in the case of Twilight. Because if you do, you’re wrong.

[4] A bunch of people sitting around a table agreeing with each other that Twilight sucks is not equivalent in any way, shape, or form to the Algonquin Round Table, except possibly by the fact that in both instances, chairs were involved. Remember this.

[5] And while we’re at it, this essay is not about you, personally. If you think it is, you need to re-read it, possibly several times.

[6] This is not a comment on quality; it is a comment on bulk. Any novel that I can do step aerobics on, whether it be Mark Helprin, Normal Mailer, Brandon Sanderson or whoever, is summarily designated a “slab”. As in “this book could conceivably be used as a paving slab”.

[7] Unless you engage in “proselytizing-through-presents”, which I regard as being on the same level as Homer buying Marge a bowling ball labeled “Homer” on The Simpsons. Unless, of course, you’re pushing my books. In that case, have at it.

[8] Or an idiot, or a moron, or whatever other pejorative leaps to mind as a replacement for “person whose opinion differs from mine”

October is for scary stories, or so I’ve been told. Happy Halloween, folks. Enjoy.

*****

“When Even The Vampires Don’t Want You”

There comes a point in time when even the vampires don’t want you. I know. I’m there.

Now don’t you go telling me there’s no such thing as vampires. They’re real. I’ve seen them. And they’re all over this damn bar.

It’s why I started coming here, really. To find them. To meet them. To give myself to one of them. No, not like some dumbass teenager who wants a million years of moonlight and roses, and hasn’t quite figured out that to the pretty vampire boy over there, you’re not a love interest, you’re lunch. I knew what I was getting into. I knew what I wanted to get into. And I wanted one of them to kill me.

I mean, it makes sense, right? Most people spend their whole lives just taking up space and using stuff. And then, when they die, they do it some more. An expensive funeral, a plot of land, a wooden box and a shiny rock planted on top of you – all that costs money. All that uses stuff. All that’s just a damn waste. And I didn’t want – I don’t want – any part of it.

I ask the bartender for another beer. Keystone. It’s crap, but it makes my money go further. One of the vampires walks past me, a girl in a black dress buttoned up to her neck and ruffled down to the floor. I’ve seen her here before. Seen her circle around damn fool boys who don’t know any better, make them fall in love in between two heartbeats and then lead them off to God knows where. They think they’re getting a little taste of goth hanky panky. She’s taking one from column B.

I’ve never seen one come back yet, but round midnight she’s here again. Alone.

I smile at her as she goes by. She pretends not to notice. I’m not pretty enough for her. Or she doesn’t like cheap beer. Or maybe she just likes to chase her food a little. The hell if I know. All I do know is that I’ve been coming here for weeks and I’m still here.

It was the plan, you see. Find a vampire, get killed by a vampire, get eaten by a vampire, don’t come back as a vampire. Simple stuff. I figure if I’m going to die – and I want to die, make no mistake about that – someone might as well get some use out of it. I don’t want some funeral home scooping out my guts and throwing them in the trash. I don’t want someone pumping me full of preservatives so I’m a pickle a thousand years after I’m dead. I just want my death to be useful for something, even if that something’s just one meal for a monster. I mean, monsters gotta eat too, right?

That’s what I thought when I found them. I didn’t judge. I still don’t. I just tracked them to the bar, and showed up, and waited. That was days back. Weeks. Maybe a month. I lost track of time. As long as the beer money holds out, I’m fine. The bartender occasionally brings me a sandwich. It’s nice of him. I guess I’m his best customer. It’s not like the vampires drink, after all.

That’s how I spot them here, after all. They don’t want beer. They just want blood. Not just any blood, either. They want it from pretty girls and handsome boys. Sad poets and lost souls looking for shining knights. How this place keeps bringing them in is beyond me. It’s dark and it’s dingy and half the crap in the jukebox won’t play. It’s in the wrong part of town and it’s hard to find and the beer selection sucks.

They’ve got red wine, though. Lots and lots of red wine. I don’t drink it. Maybe that’s my problem.

Then again, I’m not a poet. Never have been. I used to be a project manager. Software. Nothing too exciting, but it was work, and it was with people, and we produced something. It was useful. People liked the product. And that was something. It made me feel good.

But then I got sick. And then I got fired, because I got sick and in this damn state they can fire you for any damn thing they want. And  when you’ve got six months to live and not a whole hell of a lot of cash saved up, you don’t have a lot of options. You can spend it all – the time and the money – suing the bastards in hopes of getting your job back, so you can get the bennies just in time to die, broke. Or you can try to pay for the treatment yourself, and die, broke anyway. Or you can say the hell with it and spend it all on beer, and go out on your own terms.

Generally, that doesn’t involve vampires. Generally, people don’t die of what I’m dying of, either.

Another vampire walks past me. He’s a little older, a little less human looking. Doesn’t blink enough, like he’s forgotten he’s supposed to do that. Sharp dresser, though. They’re all sharp dressers. I used to be a sharp dresser.

He looks at me. That’s new. I stare back. “Can I buy you a drink?” I say, and wave my Keystone at him. Wrong thing to say. Stupid.

He shakes his head. Doesn’t walk away. That’s new.

“You should find another bar,” he says, and points at the door.

“I’m not leaving,” I say. “I’ve got just as much right to drink here as you do.”

I’m half-expecting some long-winded speech about how rights don’t apply to them, or maybe how when he talked to Cicero about human rights legislations and hate crimes against vampires, or God knows what else.

I don’t get that. I get a shrug and a sigh. Then I get a finger, pointed, at the door. “Seriously. You should go.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I tell him. “If you want me out of here, you’ll have to take me out yourself.”

The bar gets quiet. Maybe the jukebox picked a good time to break down. Maybe everyone’s hushed to hear what’s happening. Maybe I’m just stupid and melodramatic and dying, and I want this to be big. Important, even.

The bartender steps forward to intervene, and the vampire raises a hand. It’s the universal sign for “I’ll take care of this.” The bartender stops. He blinks. Then he turns away and starts washing glasses with a dirty rag. He knows. Everyone here knows. I’m an idiot. The sad poets know. The lost girls know. It’s why they come here.

And they still won’t take me.

“Please,” I say. The bar stays quiet.

“No,” the vampire says.

My guts churn. My vision blurs. The beer bottle slips out of my fingers. It falls to the floor and breaks. A little beer spills. A lot of glass shatters.

“Why not?” I finally croak out.

“Does it matter?” He stares at me and doesn’t blink.

“Yes,” I say, while my mind races. I’m too old. I’m too ugly. I drink the wrong beer. I don’t dress right. I like the wrong music. I’m not a sad poet. I’m not a poet at all. There’s no poetry in me, just blood and meat and sadness and-

“You’d taste bad,” he says, and walks away. Over his shoulder, I hear him add, “Now you should go.”

Around him, the bar comes back to life. The music starts again, or it seems to. People talk. Vampires talk. Vampires talk to people. I feel alone. I feel sick. Whatever’s in my gut is trying to get out.

A shadow falls over me. I look up. It’s the bartender. “I’m sorry,” he says, and hands me another beer, some domestic brand I don’t recognize. Probably trying to get rid of it because he can’t sell it. I don’t care. “One for the road. You’ll be leaving, right?”

I take a swig. My mouth tastes like bile and sour milk. The beer is too sharp and on the edge of skunked. Together the tastes are indescribable. Disgusting. Horrible.

Maybe it’s an acquired taste. Maybe there are other acquired tastes. Maybe I’ll wait a little longer.

“Not yet,” I say, and reach for the beer again. “Not just yet.”

There is no such thing as “writer’s block”.

More specifically, there is no such thing as “writer’s block”, if you are defining “writer’s block” – notice the clever use of quotes there – as some sort of externally imposed mental lump of concrete that – for no reason – stands between you, the author, and the precious, precious words that you need to continue writing.

Now, there is such a thing as “I don’t actually want to write this and can’t admit it to myself.” There is also such a thing as “This is going the wrong way and I don’t know how to fix it”, not to mention “I’ve written myself into a corner and don’t know how to get out of it but don’t want to throw away the stuff I’ve already written”, “I’m bored with this project but can’t let myself think that,” and “I’d rather be writing this other thing.” There are even instances of “I have to write this thing or else all these other bad things (contract cancellation, not getting paid, having your pet hamster get repossessed, etc.) will happen.

Any and all of these can bring your writing to a crashing, skidding, stuck-axle-deep-in-gooey-mud halt, simulating the symptoms of the mythical ailment called “writer’s block”. Certain other things also simulate the core symptom of “writer’s block”, including not being at your computer, spending hours playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, watching realtime score updates from the World Cup while following the vuvuzela’s twitter feed, and so forth. But really, “writer’s block” is an inaccurate catchall, a symptom labeled as a disease and about as accurate as declaring someone cursed with imbalanced humors, dropsy, or the vapors.

That’s not to say that at certain points, you won’t find it impossible to go forward on a particular project no matter how hard you try. There are various workarounds for this: jump tracks to another project, do some editing, try to bull your way through one painful adverb at a time. But the best and most efficient use of your time in that case is to figure out what’s really going on that your subconscious has decided that your muse has had a few too many and is getting cut off for the rest of the night. Figure out what’s really going on, from “I just need a nap” to “My hindbrain is telling me that I’d actually rather watch a Real Housewives of Harrisburg. Pennsylvania marathon than spend one more minute trying to pound it out”.

Be honest. Be unstinting in your scrutiny. Be willing to admit to yourself something you may not want to hear – like, say, the fifty three thousand words you’ve already laid down on that vampire novel are painfully derivative and deep down you know it – and act on it. And acting on it may be hard. It may mean starting over. It may mean mass edits. It may mean stepping away from a project for a while until you actually like it again, assuming you can afford to do so. But until you pinpoint the real problem and deal with it, you’re going to be dealing with its monstrous, unproductive offspring instead.

Which means no writing. And nobody wants that.

A while back, I got a pretty positive response to an essay about questions that you should never, ever, under any circumstances ask a writer. (I’m serious. Like, not even if they’ve got zombie plague and you’ve got the antidote, and it can only be administered through a ritualistic makeshift quiz show. Trust me.)

But with that in mind, I thought it was worth exploring the questions that you should ask a writer, the ones that will generally provoke an interesting and interested response. The ones that won’t cause a writer to transform into a snarling ball of maniacal fang-toothed fury. The ones they’re liable to answer in complete sentences, stone cold sober and with at least a faint hint of enthusiasm.

1-Tell Me About Your Book

This never fails, largely because almost all writers have enthusiastically and emphatically inscribed something into their latest book that nobody besides them – not the readers, the reviewers, the critics (and no, they’re not the same beast; cross-breeding them mules you out the dreaded Two-Starred Amazon Kvetcher), not anyone has teased out of the text. This is the one thing that (almost) every writer is dying to tell you about, the clever thing they did that they’re balloon-burstingly proud of.

Mind you, it often is clever, or subtle, or well-hidden. It is often worth hearing about, and knowing about it can often make the reading experience richer and more rewarding. Alternately, it can be where the author snuck the name of his favorite watering hole into the text (to be fair, I only ever did this in roleplaying books, not fiction), but even that can be fun, if taken in the right spirit.

2-Who Are You Reading?

Not “Who inspired you?” or “who are your favorite authors?” It’s “Who are you reading now”, with an implied “and can you tell me about the cool stuff.” Most writers actually like to read, and often do so voraciously. Being asked about what they’re reading lets them share the stuff they like – which everyone, writer or not, likes doing – and also presents an opening for the writer to talk about what he likes in someone else’s work. Rarely will you get something like “I’m reading [insert book title here], and it’s pretty good.” No, writers are an educated audience, and just like baseball stat geeks wanting to discuss the latest pitch data analysis they’ve seen, or Lost fans wanting to discourse on how precisely the series finale let them down, writers like to talk about cool writing they’ve seen and explain why it’s cool. It’s analysis and a show of appreciation and, every so often, an insight into the writer in question’s work as well.

3-What Are You Working On Now?

This one can be double-edged. Some authors prefer not talk about a current project, for fear of disrupting their mojo or getting it out in words instead of on the page, or having someone sprint down the hall and compose a similar-themed piece on their sparkly new iPad.  And that’s fine.

On the other hand, lots of authors do like to talk about a current project. Seriously. Check their blogs. The word count meters – 2045 words today on “The Vampire’s Ukelele!” Score! – alone are staggering in their omnipresence. So ask. Maybe the writer wants to talk about it because they’re looking for feedback.  Maybe they’re stuck on something and want to talk it out. And maybe they’re just doing something really cool, and can’t wait to share it because they’re xcited.

4-Which Book Do You Wish You’d Written?

If only to see how many variations on “The one that sold a zillion copies” you’ll get as a result.

5-What Were You Going For With This Thing In Your Book? (where “This Thing In Your Book” = something coherent, thoughtful, and actually evidentiary of the fact that you read the furshlugginer book with something approximating attention.)

Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book tends to go over well. Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book, liked it, and thought about it goes over better. And asking a question that indicates that you read it, liked it, thought about it and came up with something new and interesting to ask will make you a friend for life.

There is danger here, though. Asking a question that’s been heard a million times before? Asking a question that indicates you didn’t get further than the first paragraph of the back cover text (which was written over lunch by an overworked intern who had only the cover art to go by, and who has a psychological condition whereby they must use the word “mordant” at least twice per sentence or else become convinced they’re George S. Kaufman risen from the dead)? Asking a question you already know the answer to? And worst of all, asking a question that’s not really a question, but rather a chance to show off how brilliant you are when it comes to the author’s work. These don’t go over so well. Trust me on this one.

6-Can I Buy You A Drink?

Yes. Yes, you can. Next question.

7-What’s Your Process For Writing?

Not “How do I become a writer?” Not “Please tell me I’m doing the right thing with my own quirky, convoluted approach, any criticism of which will provoke an angry blog post and possibly an assault with a sock filled with quarters.” A genuine inquiry into how a writer works – really works, as in “puts butt in seat and starts typing” – can deliver valuable insight into how the act of writing happens for a particular author. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an honest answer along with some explications of the whys and wherefores of that process. If you’re not, you’ll at least get a story of how Famous Writer X was rude to you for no reason whatsoever, and you’ll be able to cadge drinks at conventions on that one for years.

Obviously, these are not hard and fast rules. Rather, they’re suggestion based on years of observation, discussion, and having to bail out writer friends from local holding cells after they beat one too many over-eager interrogators senseless with rolled-up convention programs. But if you do want to talk to a writer – really talk to one – you could do a lot worse than to start here.

Originally this month’s piece was going to be a followup to last month’s piece, but then I got myself stranded in London by volcanic action. So, here’s a little something inspired by that instead.

Enjoy.

********

Follow the sign.

It’s small, and it’s brown, and it’s really not designed in the slightest to catch the eye. It almost apologizes as it sits there, letting you know diffidently that yes, there is in fact a museum down this way, and by the way it’s terribly sorry to have bothered you with that information.

The tourist seeking the big names will ignore the sign. He will consult his dearly-bought walking map, figure out that the British Museum is thataway, or the Victoria and Albert is over yonder, or that if he’s willing to risk being run over by a fleet of black taxis painted up like Jack Daniels labels, he can make it into the relative safety of Regent’s Park where all he has to worry about is being brained by an errant soccer ball.

Of which, incidentally, there are plenty.

But if you follow the sign, it leads you away from the busy thoroughfare of Euston Street. It takes you down something narrower, and suddenly on the left there’s a university, magnificent and stereotypical, all carved columns in soot-stained white stone, and students lounging in the  quad pretending to study. Surely, here is where the apologetic museum can be found, on the grounds of an institute of higher learning.

And it can, sort of. Not here, though. The way is blocked. No way through the stolid edifices where knowledge is housed, kept, and tamed. Instead, a small map, cousin to the sign, gently suggests that if one were in fact interested in seeing said museum, one might want to…walk around, perhaps? To the other side of the campus?

If a map could cough with embarrassment, this one would.

So it’s off down Gower Street again, and then a left onto Torrington, and don’t you let yourself get distracted by the thrumming hive of bookery that is the original Waterstone’s lurking there. Plenty of time for that later, yes there will be. Just remember the prices are in pounds and that your suitcase is already full to bursting, and you may escape with your arms unburdened and wallet intact.

But that’s for later. Because on the left is Malet. Malet Place, officially, though it’s not a place, it’s an alley. And if it is not a dark alley, it is certainly an insufficiently illuminated one. It’s not narrow, but the buildings on either side are tall and utterly disinterested in letting light through. There’s construction here, too, and all the detritus that goes with that, and a definite sense of who belongs here and who doesn’t. If you are not a student, if you are not helping build this place, then you do not belong here. The rest of the city beckons. Why here?

It’s something to think about. A museum that tries this hard to hide itself, surely one can respect its wishes. There are museums glad of visitors. The Wellcome Center flings its doors wide, positively exhibitionistic about its collection of death masks and artificial limbs and Darwinian knick-knacks. The British Library practically demands you come see the Magna Carta and Beatles lyrics scrambled on the backs of birthday cards. Why press on?

Because toward the end of the alley, you see a flag over a doorway, or perhaps a banner. It announces that the museum is in fact here, that you have in fact found it, and that the rattling dream of your youth when you wandered, alone and utterly entranced, among the pieces of ancient Egyptiana in the Univeristy of Pennsylvania’s dim-lit and hoary collection, can be dusted off and refreshed. Here, now, is a proper museum of Egyptology. Here is a museum of Egyptology that in concept dredges up jerky footage of Howard Carter looting the Valley of the Kings and every bad pulp story about a mummy, ever. It is irresistible.

There’s a smaller sign on the door. It says, in so many words, that, yes, the Museum is here and that it’s up the steps and for the love of God, what are you doing hanging around the doorway, anyway? Overhead, a scrap of breeze catches the banner. It waves once or twice. It’s a sign, or at least a suggestion.

The stairs, on the other hand, are not promising. They are concrete. They are grey – not gray, but in fact laden with an ineffable Britishness that strips the unwary “a” from the word and replaces it with a proper, dignified “e”. One suspects that any further discussion leads to use of the word “colour”, and from there, things will go rapidly downhill.

The museum, though, is uphill. Three or so flights uphill, to be honest, the stairwell unmarked with any signage or encouragement that the curious traveler is indeed headed in the right direction.

And then, at the top, a small note, and a door. The museum is through here, the note says, though the door looks forbidding. Stuck, even. It takes two pulls, and the act of exertion for the second is vaguely awkward, as if the whole thing is too mannered to be despoiled by a proletariat grunt.

Behind the door, a desk. A small one, and sitting at it, a very surprised-looking woman of later years. She is wearing glasses, there is something complicated-looking on her desk, and the first thing out of her mouth is “Are you from the British Musuem?”

This is a moment to savor. After all, how often does one get mistaken for someone from the British Museum? In North Carolina, for example, it happens very, very rarely. Why exactly one has been identified wrongly as being from the British Museum is another question – surely it isn’t the GDC Speaker T-shirt (tasteful black, of course); maybe it’s the glasses. Or maybe it’s the dimly glimpsed tour group in the room beyond, and one is assumed to be a straggler from that assemblage simply because precious few other folks ever make it this far.

Of course, the honorable thing is to admit that one’s origins are humbler, indeed, that one is a tourist.

“A tourist!” she says, happily and with surprise. “We don’t get a lot of those in here.” The faintest of nods indicates the doorway through which the exhibits can be found. It’s dim on the other side, and there are large display cases made of dark wood whose shelves can just be seen. They look full. They look very full.

That, then, is the liminal moment. To step through the doorway and actually see what the interior of this place holds, the realization of a hundred bad movies and overheated histories and two-fisted pulp stories about tough guys with Archaeology degrees raiding Arks of all varieties, lost and found. It’s all the imagined fussy British archaeologists in pith helmets taking time out from the dig for tea and the crumbling treasure of doom-shadowed Dunsanian Meroe, all the stereotypes and archetypes and reproduced sepia-toned daguerrotypes waiting at that doorway, but not beyond it. All the stories, real and sort-of-real and utterly, deliriously fictional, as mismatched as the Great Sphinx’s anatomy and yet all of a piece.

Beyond it is facts. Beyond it is specimens in neatly – or densely – arranged shelves, with labels and dates and explanations. Beyond it is what is, explanations of which pigments are indicators of the Ninth Dynasty and well-reasoned hypotheses as to what each and every scrap of porcelain might have been used for. It is right, and proper, and appropriate.

In the doorway, though, are the stories, the ones that might have led someone small away from his tour group in another museum three thousand miles distant, or down a crowded alley, or away from the hustle and bustle and much more famous attractions of the London street. The stories will all fall away once the threshold is crossed and the cold truth is seen, but that, too, makes sense. After all, stories have endings, and in their endings, pave the way for their successors. Stories – residual influences and inescapable curiosity – have led errant footsteps here. – which has, of course, become a story for that very wanderer to tell in turn. Squint hard enough, and it’s a means of self-perpetuation for a thousand narratives, made unrecognizable from generation to generation of inspired tales. It works for them, though; who are we to argue.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, someone is looking at a brown-and-white sign that suggests diffidently the location of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. They are staring, and shrugging, and moving on toward something a bit better known. And that’s their story, born of their stories, and they are welcome to it.

By itself, an object tells you nothing. It is the context that tells you everything, the description and motion that lets that object become part of the story.

Take, for instance, an ambulance. By itself, it isn’t much. But put it on a busy freeway, lights flashing and moving a hundred miles an hour, and you have a story. Life and death, the skill of the driver, the race to the victim or the emergency room. The simple object full of possibility – for rescue, for tension, for a thousand things – has become part of a story.

Or, conversely put it somewhere else. Put it on the road, coming around the corner from the place you’re desperately trying to reach in time. Turn the sirens off, and the lights, too. Set it at normal driving speed, not the frantic plunge of a lifesaving sprint to the hospital.

Make sure it’s going in the wrong direction. Watch it go the other way.

That told me a story, too.

###

I don’t think my grandmother ever read any of my books. By the time I started getting published, her eyes weren’t the best any more. Besides, ghosts and vampires and magic swords weren’t really her speed. There were other books on the shelves of her house. Chaim Potok. James Herriot. Things like that, Some were hers, some were my grandfather’s. I never did ask who preferred which.

She had all of my books, though. They were displayed prominently, tiny paperbacks with purple werewolves on the cover tucked into a towering bookshelf in between the coffee table-sized monsters that discussed American Cut Glass and The History of Israel.

They meant a lot to her. And that meant a lot.

###

My mother wanted to write. She was good at it, won lots of awards in school. Once she told me about the time she accidentally walked out on stage to receive someone else’s writing award, simply because she and these other girls had won awards in the same order for so long (first, second, third) that it had become rote. When the order got switched up, just this once, she was already on autopilot and out on the stage.

If you know my mother, it’s hilarious. Trust me.

Mom stopped writing in college. She ran into a professor who didn’t like her work. He slammed it. It stopped her cold. To my knowledge, she hasn’t written since.

It means a lot to her that I write, even if it’s not necessarily the sort of thing she would prefer me to be writing. “When are you going to write something nice?” she’s asked me a few times. The fairy tale that I did as the intro to the second edition of a game called Changeling, lavishly illustrated by Rebecca Guay, remains her favorite thing that I’ve written. But what matters is that I write. I think she’s glad I didn’t give up on that dream, that when I ran into my own professor who critiqued my work with “We have nothing to say to one another,” I kept going. Or maybe she’s just happy I found something I genuinely love doing.

We found some of her writing, back when we were packing up the family house in Philadelphia in preparation for my parents’ move south. It was well preserved and hand-written, neatly scribed on a sheaf of lined paper.

I read it. It was good. Maybe if she’d ignored that professor, if she hadn’t stopped, things would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten the encouragement to write that I got from her. Maybe I would have gotten more, and found that particular calling sooner.

I don’t know.

It is what it is. But her writing’s still here, and it’s not too late for her to start again.

###

At a certain point after the death of a loved one, the stories blur. You become hesitant to tell them, because you’re not sure if they really happened that way or if that’s the way you wanted them to have happened. You pause before beginning the telling, afraid that you might not get it right, that you might accidentally offend through misremembering or dramatic license.

You worry that your memories of the one who’s gone fit with everyone else’s, and you become afraid. Afraid to share them. Afraid to risk adjustment to the cherished recall through someone else’s recollection that, no, that’s not what happened. Afraid that the discussion or disagreement will take precedence over the memory itself, and somehow subtly replace it, attach itself in association.

I have memories of my grandmother. Memories of her catching me stealing an extra piece of candy out of the bowl on her glass-top coffee table, and telling me I could have it but there’d no candy next time. Memories of asking her for her chicken soup recipe for the first time, and of her clueing me in to the true and sacred secret of the light and fluffy matzahball. Of asking her if it was OK to change the recipe, because my friend Ed had suggested – sacrilege! – adding shitakes to the mix. Memories of Thanksgivings and weekend visits. Memories of sitting quietly with her in the TV room, telling her what I’d been up to in the months since the last time I’d been able to get up to see her, and all the while her cat rubbed against my feet in hopes that I’d be the sort of sucker who knew where the cat treats were kept.

These memories may not be accurate. But they are mine, and they are true.

###

There are things in my house that came from my grandparents. Some are valuable. Some are not, at least not in the sort of way the marketplace values. Some I was told to take; a few tools, my grandfather’s whisky collection, things like that. A few were given to me, things it was decided I should have because I was the right one to have them.

And at the last, before my grandmother came south on what would be her final journey, I asked for one last thing. It was a tourist gewgaw, a bit of memorabilia that my grandparents had picked up on a trip to Spain. It was a stand, and a series of cocktail skewers done up to look like swords. Swept hilt, basket hilt, mock-gold and steel and inlay every color of the rainbow – all that, and maybe two inches long. Sharp enough to hurt if you jabbed someone with one with intent, tiny enough that a mock duel fought with them looked ludicrous, even when the hands clutching them belonged to children.

That’s what I asked for. My mother, who was helping my grandmother get ready for the trip, seemed surprised. She asked me why.

I told her it was because when I was a kid, all of us grandchildren would take those swords and pretend to duel, which wasn’t strictly true. Mainly, we poked one particular younger cousin with them, but that’s not why I asked for them. He’s bigger than me now, and in better shape, and if he remembers and decides he finally wants payback, I’m going to need more than cocktail skewers to protect me.

But really, that’s not it, either. The real reason is that they are indelibly fixed in my mind as being perfectly and utterly of that house, of that time, of my grandparents. Because every time I walked into that house, child or adolescent or man, I found myself reaching for them as I walked past the shelf where they stood, to reassure myself I was really there. Because I want that stories – all those stories, really – with me.

An object, imbued with time and place. Description, too, I hope. No motion, though. Not now. Maybe someday, and for someone else. But not now.

1-Where do you get your ideas?

Various famous author-types have tackled this one with answers as diverse as Schenectady (upstate New York), Utica (upstate New York) and “the world around me”, which can be boiled down to “everywhere, including upstate New York”. The correct answer, then, is “Upstate New York.” If you wish to become a serious writer, you should immediately sell all of your possessions, buy a charming bed-and-breakfast in the Finger Lakes region, and acquire a taste for Gennesee Cream Ale.

Either that, or find your own source of inspiration. I’m told it can be done as far south as Maryland.

2-I have a great idea for a novel. If I tell it to you, will you write it so we can share the profits?

No.

3-Could you write me into your next book?

With the exception of one specific former coworker, who asked to be included in one of my novels in the guise of a water nymph (and a less nymph-like fellow you cannot possibly imagine), the answer to this is almost invariably “No.” This is for one simple reason: if I do it, you will get mad at me over the results. I mainly write A)horror novels and B)video games wherein lots and lots of people get shot. If I write you into anything, odds are that the fictional version of you is going to die. Horribly. And then you’ll be mad.

4-Do you know what you should have done with your last book?

Two things. One, written it faster. Two, added more llamas. Llamas are a clear sign of quality. Anything else?

5-Can you get me a copy of [insert name of highly anticipated best-selling book] in advance, because you’re a writer? I know all of you writers hang out together.

Sadly, it’s true. J.K. Rowling actually lives around the corner, and frequently admonishes me to keep my cat out of her carefully tended begonias. We regularly go bowling with Mitch Albom, Clive Cussler, and P.G. Wodehouse (remarkably good English on his ball, especially for a dead guy) because all writers do in fact know each other by virtue of being in the same profession. As such, we are more than happy to randomly fling copies of books by any and every author out there around as requested, in a sort of Pacman Jones “making it rain hardbacks” scenario.

But, since reciprocity is only fair, I asked a friend of mine who’s an orthodontist if he could get me some free veneers from a cosmetic dentist in LA. Because, after all, they’re in the same business so they must know each other.

6-Seriously. Why don’t you want to write this awesome book I had the idea for?

Because my time is, sadly, finite, and I don’t have enough of it to write half of my own ideas.

Because your idea may or may not be that good, and if I tell you it isn’t, you’re going to get mad.

Because writing “your” idea means that you are invariably going to meddle in my writing process, which is going to make the writing process less enjoyable for both of us.

Because I like my ideas better.

Because I am a selfish jerk and unwilling to devote my time to your vision.

Take your pick.

7-I want to be a writer. What should I do?

Scientific studies have shown that roughly 86.4% of all people who ask questions about “how do I become a writer?” actually mean “How do I become a best-selling author without actually taking the time to sit down and write?” The answer, of course, is “make a sex tape and release it on the internet.” Unwanted side effects include the possibility of having multiple reality shows on E!, so consider yourself warned.

Actually sitting down and writing has proven to be a far less effective and far more time-intensive approach, but there are those who still insist on following it.

We have names for those sorts of people, but I’m not going to print them in a family blog.

8-Why do you write?

Because I’m lousy at math.

Most writers I know have rituals. These run the gamut from adjusting their desks a certain way to writing by candlelight to setting a glass of perfectly innocent booze on fire before each writing project as a sacrifice to the Writing Ancestors. They may sound silly, or wasteful (perfectly good booze, after all) or unintuitive, but in their own way, they all make sense. And by make sense, I don’t mean that the individual rituals themselves are constructed on a foundation of adamantine logic and garbed in shining steel armor of unassailable rationale. I mean that the idea and practice of rituals themselves makes pefect sense, particularly for us writer types.

Why? Because rituals are, in large part, about comfort. They are about adjusting one’s surroundings in a particular way in hopes of achieving a desired result, and once that change has been accomplished the ritualist is in a more comfortable place. More comfort means less brainpower devoted to worrying, to nagging thoughts and “what ifs” and everything but the task at hand (in this case, writing). More energy devoted to the task at hand generally means more and better work. The idea of doing more and better work becomes associated with the performance of the ritual, which makes it even more comforting, and, well, you see where this goes.

Now, I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that the performance of a ritualized behavior induces a shamanic trance, an ecstatic state of creative being. Others can debate that to their hearts’ content; that sort of thing really isn’t my style. What I can say definitively, however, is that I do have certain rituals built into my writing process, and that when I perform them faithfully, I tend to write better. I find myself less easily distracted, I write better, and I write longer and more quickly.

And again, I don’t think there’s a mystic or psychic or religious component to this. Rather, it’s just my way of lowering myself into the writing mood, which is all that it needs to be.

Like anything else, rituals evolve. Once upon a time, I’d put a finger of scotch (not the good stuff) out on my desk every time I sat down to write. Later, once I acquired a better appreciation for scotch (and found myself doing a lot of my writing in a building where a any hooch left unattended for more than eight seconds wasn’t safe), things changed. I did most of my writing late, late, late at night in those days, which meant mainlining caffeine, which meant mainlining Coca-Cola. Eventually it got to the point where I conflated writing with the presence of the sweet nectar of downtown Atlanta (Seriously. Downtown Atlanta is positively coated in the stuff. It’s terrifying) and found myself unable to get into a writing mood unless I’d Coked myself up. The fact that I rarely found myself able to sleep before 7 AM on the nights when I did this, well, we’re all young and stupid at some point.

And when the caffeine and the tooth-melting sweetness got to be too much for my aging dentition and sleep habits, I found rituals evolving again. As ridiculous as it sounds, there was a dry patch in there (no pun intended) after I kicked the Coke habit but before I found a comfortable routine to replace it. I lapsed a couple of times, went on binges when I felt desperate and blocked and in dire need of word count. After all, a frosty red can just said “writing” to me in a way that more sensible beverages didn’t. Without it, I felt uncomfortable and distracted, not out of any particular love of Coke products, but rather because drinking Coke was part of getting my brain in a receptive state for writing. It took, literally, years to retrain myself, including a sad and desperate fling with Caffeine Free Diet Coke (truly, the drink of the self-delusional).

These days, the daily ritual is, if nothing else, better for my teeth. Clear the desk, shut the door, start the music and, if I’m hoping to be particularly productive. It’s the pre-project ritual that’s gotten more complicated, a lengthy and reverent process of putting together a writing playlist that reinforces the mood and tone of what I want to write. Firefly Rain was Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and southern rock out the yin-yang; the work I did on Splinter Cell: Conviction was 98% action movie sountracks (instrumental only, thanks) mixed with a light sprinking of Foo Fighters. Why Foo Fighters? I have no idea. It just felt right, and once it felt right, I didn’t feel right not writing to it.

Like I said, ritual.

Perhaps the notion of sorting out a writing playlist has deeper or more logical underpinnings. After all, sorting out what music is or isn’t appropriate for writing a particular project is in large part defining what the project itself is or isn’t. You can’t know if something fits unless you have a good idea – conscious or otherwise – of what you’re going to be writing to that particular piece of music. After all, that piece of music can either reinforce or break the mood you’re trying to achieve – I at least tend not to get a lot of writing done when my lizard brain forces me to sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, for example – and so it’s a litmus test, a way of gut-checking whether I know what I’m writing well enough to actually get down to it.

Like I said, comfort. Purpose. Ritual.

And less flaming booze, which is always a good idea.

Case in point:

There was one lurking in the closet in my home office. As closets go, mind you, it’s not terribly exciting. It’s used for storing books and shipping materials; it’s where the unloved eBay auctions go to die. But today, there was something different..

This morning, I found a case in there, black plastic and metal trim. It’s not mine. I don’t know where it came from, or how it got there. Maybe my wife’s nephew left it behind after his stay and it’s just come to light, maybe it belongs to the writing student who’s living in our guest room. Maybe it came from somewhere else; when enough relatives live nearby and have keys to your house, things magically appear in strange places as a matter of course. Pairs of shorts, for example. Heating trays for party food. Sweaters – Mom won’t always fess up to it, but there have been multiple incidents of drive-by sweatering for me and my wife.

But this doesn’t look like that. It’s tucked away, someplace it shouldn’t have gotten to. Carefully, I take it out and lay it down.

It’s a musical instrument case, I can see that now. I don’t recognize the brand, but that’s not surprising. It’s been a while since I took out my clarinet, ten years and counting. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that it’s a musical instrument. Strange things have moved through this house in strange cases. Magic the Gathering cards. Shotguns. Arsenic ore and Chinese silk, French chocolate in irregular shapes and books a hundred years old. It could be anything in there, anything at all.

So I open it. Inside, there’s a saxophone, an alto. It’s not mine; I have two and they’re both tenors, both accounted for.

Scattered through the case are dried roses and playing cards. I pick a card up. It’s the jack of spades, curved slightly with time or pressure or too close a relationship with the saxophone’s bell. I put it back gently and pick up another card. Another jack, another spade – so it goes for all of them there,

The dried roses? They crumble to the touch.

Carefully, I put the last card back in the case and shut the lid. I sit it gently against the wall, not quite ready to put it back into hiding, and step over to my desk. There’s a notepad there, kept against emergencies of information or inspiration. I pick up a pen – dayglo green, a relic of a long-ago Microsoft party at a long-ago GDC – and write a few words down. Case. Roses. One-eyed jacks. Who wants it? Who left it behind? Why?

The story hides in the spaces between them. I haven’t found it yet. Someday, I’ll go looking. Tonight, I just know where it came from. That’s enough for me.