Hey! I’m here encouraging you! FEEL ENCOURAGED!!!

Well, as I’m writing this we just passed the halfway point for the month, which means we’re halfway through The Writing Exercise That Used To be Known As NaNoWriMo (I’m working on a good acronym).

Hopefully you’re still going. Working on any project starts out fun. It’s great at the beginning, when we can just sort of be a firehose of ideas. We can spray clever dialogue and cool action beats and creepy moments everywhere. Cool thing, cool thing. cool thing, damn writing is easy!

Of course, the tough thing is then at some point—weirdly enough, often right around that halfway mark—all this stuff needs to start tying together somehow. I’ve got to take all those clever/ cool/ creepy ideas and make something coherent out of them. And that means this just became work! And work sucks! I’m pretty sure at least one of you is reading this thinking “I wanted to be a writer so I wouldn’t have to work!”

Plus, NaNoWriMo was this sort of group activity, and without it suddenly we’re all just… y’know, sitting alone in our rooms typing for no real reason. There’s no prize. No actual deadline. It’s easy to miss a day or two, think about how much work it’d be to get back into it, and just say “Ehhhhh… I’m done.”

But you don’t want to give up now. We’re on the downhill slope now. It’s half done. Yeah, it is. You don’t need to hit any set word count, you just need to keep at it. Again, this is more about doing it—sitting down and writing as much as you can, as often as you can—for the course of the month.

And yes… it’s going to feel like work sometimes. I wish I could tell you it doesn’t, that there’s a point when it’s going to be nonstop fun. But I’m not going to lie to you. Somedays you just have to sit there and glare at the screen and pound the keyboard until you figure out how Ashley believably ends up with the canopic jar when Devon didn’t’ know how to do it. But the cool thing is, it’s your work. You’re doing it for you. For your story. And nobody can write this story except you.

Also… this is supposed to be a first draft. Don’t worry about too many things lining up. First drafts can be gloriously messy things. Heck, my most recent first draft had a blank page with <KILL FRED HERE> on it. That’s it.

For now, just keep going. You’re more than halfway there. You, as the kids say, have got this.

And hey—my offer from last time still stands. For November, this is your writing community space. Post your achievements, frustrations, questions here and I promise you I’ll respond within the day with a high five, a commiseration, an answer, or some kind of encouragement to keep writing. I’ll check in every day. Maybe more often if I’m trying to avoid work. And you can respond to each other, too.

Next time… well, next time’s just in a couple of days. But since I just turned in edits on one book and I’m working through the third draft of another, I figure I’d talk about drafts and revisions.

Until then, go write!

It’s November! It’s been November for a week now! We all know what that means, right?!?

Well, it’s meaning a lot of different things than we all probably hoped it would. And I totally get it if that means you don’t want to think about writing today. Or tomorrow. Or until sometime in early 2029 or so.

But for the rest of you… let’s talk about National Novel Writing Month. Why some of you probably aren’t doing it this year. And why maybe you should just write anyway.

And I’m going to try to make it quick and semi-inspiring.

If you hadn’t heard, NaNoWriMo decided to shoot themselves in the foot a few months back and then decided to get both knees, too, because they had a few rounds left. They took on a generative AI company as a sponsor and then—loudly–announced they’d decided it was cool if you wanted to count AI-generated churn as your NaNoWriMo project. Not surprisingly, many folks were offended by this since the whole point of National Novel Writing Month was… well, writing. I mean, it’s right there in the title. There was backlash, commentary, discourse, and a lot less interest in joining NaNoWriMo. Go figure.

This is, understandably, depressing for a lot of of people. NaNoWriMo was an already-in-place writing infrastructure. It provided a solid, clear goal and a community where folks could share progress and encouragement and tips.

It also gave a sense of accomplishment and learning. As I’ve said many times in the past, the whole point of NaNoWriMo is just to make progress on a first draft. Maybe I make a ton of progress and get 60K words done. Maybe more. Maybe I only get ten or fifteen. The goal here is to make a serious effort to write every day, or at least as often as I can, so I can get an honest sense of how much I can write.

Because there’s always reasons not to write. Day jobs. Commutes to day jobs. Spending more time with our loved ones. Dealing with annoying problems and issues that crop up in our lives (I think I need to get my roof redone!!!). Having massive dread about the future. Just needing to get one decent night of sleep. Just one!

So NaNoWriMo was a great excuse to try to focus past all of that. It was a reason to tell friends and family “hey, not this week, sorry.” It was a chance for us to really focus on this whole writing thing.

But… do you really need some website for that?

You can set your own goal for this month. For any month. You don’t need NaNoWriMo for that. You can just tell your friends, “hey, I just really need to make some headway on this book right now.” I did that for years. And there’s so many folks out there offering advice and tips. Heck… you’re reading this on a blog with over fifteen years worth of them.

Look, if you want… I know I go back and forth about my posting schedule here, but if some of you want it, I’ll give you an encouraging post every week this month. Even Thanksgiving week. A little nudge (or maybe a good shove) to keep going, to keep doing it, because you can do this. You can have a contest of one and still come out of November in the same place you would’ve been with NaNoWriMo.

Heck, I’ll tell you what. For the month of November, this can be your writing community space. Post any achievements, frustrations, questions here and I promise you I’ll respond with a high five, a commiseration, an answer, or some kind of encouragement to keep writing. I’ll check in every day. Maybe more often if I’m trying to avoid work. And you can respond to each other, too.

Y’see, Timmy, it sucks that NaNoWriMo made some awful choices. But don’ t add that to the list of reasons you’re not going to get any writing done. You’ve still got everything you need to do this. You just need to, y’know… do it.

Next time—well that’s up to you. More encouragement? Or should I just do a usual post in two weeks about drafts or something like that? Let me know.

And until then… go write!

<<Just a reminder that you could subscribe to the newsletter and be getting all of this delivered straight to your inbox two weeks earlier. Yeah, I know, we’re all overwhelmed with newsletters. Buried in them. But this one only comes out once a month. Twice if I’ve got something really cool to tell you. So maybe give it a try… >>

October.

Finally.

On one hand, I feel like that scene in every movie when the villain rolls their shoulders as their newfound/ regained power settles over them (cue the ominous music). On the other hand, like half those villains, I’m also oddly unprepared for the moment. This holiday should be the time my creativity just goes wild, and instead—despite all the various skeletons and gravestones and other decorations in the garage—I just feel kind of unsure and indecisive.

Although I know a lot of that is… well, a ton of the stress and anxiety we’ve been dealing with here for the past three months or so has finally resolved. I don’t want to talk about it any more than that—not yet, anyway—but I think the sudden lack of pressure has left me a little off-balance. My beloved and I were talking last night about how mentally it sort of feels like it should be mid-August, maybe? We lost a bunch of time and now we’re stuck playing catch-up. Part of me knows I should be putting out decorations and another part of me just doesn’t want to do anything. Seriously, on one level I could just sit on the couch and do absolutely nothing for a day or six and it’d probably be kind of healthy, from a certain perspective. I know, back in the olden times, it was pretty normal for me to finish a big film project, wrap everything out, and then just sort of shut off for a day or two in my apartment. I remember one day when I spent an hour or so standing in front of a bookshelf. Not reading or organizing, just… standing there.

Anyway, I’ll probably put Halloween decorations up in a couple of days. Maybe I’ll just do Khonshu again. Or maybe last minute inspiration. Guess we’ll see.

Let’s go over some writing updates.

As you’re reading this, I just now got the first round of note from my editor for God’s Junk Drawer. Like, just now, as I was about to hit “send it” on the newsletter. Actually, it’s why the newsletter’s going out a little later than planned. But once I hit send, I’ll be diving into that. And you’ll probably hear more about it next time.

I’ve also finished the second draft of TOS. It’s a solid, beginning-to-end manuscript, about 14,000 words longer than the last draft. And now it’s ready for some tightening and polishing. My hope is to do some of that in small waves whenever I need a break from God’s Junk Drawer edits. One quick pass here, another one there, and so on. In a perfect world, both of these are done by… Thanksgiving? Then I can take a quick breather for the three or four day holiday weekend and give TOS one last read-through, and have it off to my beta readers first thing in the year.

And look, if you’re not already a beta reader, please don’t ask. Let’s not make it weird and awkward for both of us.

I also did some tiny, last-minute edits for that magazine dream project I mentioned last time. Really, it was more of just approving some very tiny edits. Said magazine has their own style—most of them do—and I pretty much just had to check with the editor on that and then give my thumbs up. The style changes wouldn’t be my first choice, but they’re also not so awful that they’re worth fighting over. Picking your battles is a notable percentage of a professional writing career.

Oh, one other thing. Last time I mentioned Combat Monsters: Untold Tales of WWII. It’s an anthology I’ve got a Carter & Kraft story in and it’s up for preorder in all the usual places (out February 11th). But if you’re in southern California (or just like signed books), you might want to hold off on that preorder. Just for a little bit. The editor, Henry Herz, is trying to set up a couple signings, so there may be scribbled-in copies available in San Diego and Los Angeles. And if you wanted to come say hi and get it personalized, that’s cool too. Hopefully I’ll know more about those in the next few weeks.

What else have I got for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Agatha All Along has been fun, but this past week I think it bumped up to really good. Finally got to see Abigail, the movie about the little ballerina girl who gets kidnapped and thought it was fantastic. If you haven’t seen it yet, I don‘t think there’s anything else you need to know going in…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I got an advance copy of The Contest by Jeff MacAfee and it’s just fantastic. I’m bitterly jealous, which is the best compliment any writer can give another. It’s not out until early next year but I think you can preorder it now. Got my second ROM omnibus and have been enjoying that.

Cool New Toys
I stress-ordered a lot of toys over the past few months, and a bunch of them have shown up in the past week or so. A few more Animal Warriors (waaaaaay too many at this point). I emptied my Pile O’ Loot from Big Bad Toystore so I finally have my Ghost Rider and my Werewolf By Night Ted aka Man-Thing. And I just got an alert that all my long-awaited Operation: Monster Force figures are finally in stock and… well, there’s a lot of stuff in my Pile O’ Loot again

And I think that’s it for this month. Many thanks, as always, for subscribing to this nonsense.

A few years back I was on a panel with Pierce Brown (back when cons were safe) and he made the great analogy that genre is like a compass. It’s a thing pointing you in a certain direction. You like sci-fi, go north. Fantasy is off to the west. Romance, head east. Sexy romance, you head south-east. You may not find the exact thing you want, but that’s the direction of things that’ll probably interest you.

I think genre is also a set of expectations. Really, I think genre sets expectations. If you tell me something is horror, at some point I’m going to expect something scary or creepy. If you tell me it’s comedy, I’m going to be waiting for the laughs. If it’s a murder mystery, where the heck is my body? I WAS PROMISED A DEAD BODY!

And I think this is where problems can arise. Because if I’m following that compass and I’ve got those expectations, it can be very disorienting to get something else. More to the point, no matter what it is, that something else is going to fail to meet those expectations I have. And when something doesn’t deliver like that, our automatic reaction is almost always that this thing is bad. It’s wrong.

Look at it this way. If you tell me we’re going to the LEGO store and instead we go to the book store… well, I mean, these are great and I enjoy them both a lot. But they’re still different places. And depending on how much I was looking forward to one, I might be less inclined to see the good points of the other.

Likewise, if I’m referring to something as the wrong genre, or leading people to believe it’s a different genre… they may view things with a harsher eye when they follow that compass to my work. I mean, you can try to defend it any way you like, but the simple truth is the latest Hellraiser movie is the worst-written, worst-structured romantic comedy you’re ever going to watch. It’s just horrible. Seriously, it misses every single romantic comedy benchmark you can think of. The two leads don’t even kiss at any point!

Of course, Hellraiser wasn’t trying to be a romantic comedy. Not remotely. It’s a fantastic horror movie, but that won’t matter when I’ve told everyone to judge it by romantic comedy standards. They’ll look through that lens and nothing will line up. It’ll all be… wrong.

And this holds of sub-genres, too. We all recognize that “horror” isn’t one, monolithic thing. There are so many different types and flavors of creepiness. Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy is horror, sure, but that doesn’t mean we immediately lump it in with The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Cherie Priest’s The Toll is horror, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing the same things as Chuck Wendig’s Black River Orchard, which doesn’t approach things the same way as the Out There Screaming anthology. And none of these are like my own book, The Broken Room, which has a bunch of horror elements.

Why do I bring this up?

When most of us start off as writers, we flail a bit. We attempt to copy stories even though we don’t quite understand all the mechanics of them. We’re not sure where our own stories fit under that big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or…). We’ll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the tone of yet another through the whole thing.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons. One is so I’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere. Two is that I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is. If I tell an editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected. My readers may toss it aside.

At the worst, they’ll all remember me as “that idiot” the next time they see something of mine.

Next time… well, for some of you November means NaNoWriMo. It used to, anyway. So I wanted to toss out a few quick thoughts about that.

Until then, go write.