Archives: Writing

Invocation of the Muses

Thalia Took’s Sketch of 9 Greek Muses

One of Steven Pressfield’s main topics of focus in The War of Art is the fight against what he calls Resistance — the unrelenting struggle a writer faces to NOT write. Every day a writer has to push forward and make the writing happen. You just can’t wait for inspiration, at least not if you’re going to write professionally.

I’ve found that The War of Art is one of the most useful writing books I’ve ever read because of its description of and advice about  waging the battle against Resistance (note the capital R — you must respect the enemy). To help me do battle, one of my tactics is to recognize that when you sit down to write you’re entering a different kind of mental state. I tell writing students that just as a professional athlete would not simply arrive at the track field and start sprinting, a writer will be poorly served to jump into the seat and immediately start typing.

It’s my thought that you have to acknowledge that change, that transition from one mental state (where you’re worrying about groceries and laundry or that news article) to another where the story is all, in order to do good work.

On the first page of The War of Art, Pressfield describes what he does each day to prepare to write so that he can be in the proper frame. Amongst several other personal rituals, Pressfield says a prayer. His is the Invocation of the Muse from Homer’s Odyssey, translated by T.E. Lawrence (that’s Lawrence of Arabia, incidentally).

I’ve never been much of a praying man myself, but I liked the sound of this, so I looked up the prayer, which I had read as a school boy and probably blipped over:

Plague of Titles

I thought I’d pen a quick note just so everyone knew I was still alive. There’s a lot of activity here at Jones central, and some of it is related to the fact I have a looming deadline.

The final stages of the official The Bones of The Old Ones launch campaign are wrapping up. In just a little while I’ll be promoting The Desert of Soul’s official paperback UK release, but in between now and then I’m working away on my next Paizo Pathfinder book. I’m on the final stages of the first draft of whatever the sequel to Plague of Shadows is going to be called.

The fact that I don’t have a title yet bugs me. Usually the title is one of the first things to reach me. For instance, I knew that The Bones of the Old Ones would be titled that after the first few chapters were written, no matter that the entire text was heavily revised several times. The Desert of Souls had a title almost from the first line. But so far a title for Elyana’s next adventure eludes me. All I know for sure is that it really can’t have anything to do with Plague or Shadows and probably shouldn’t have an “of” construction because A.) I’ve been doing that a lot and B.) Paizo has a lot of “of” titles.

Hopefully something will occur to me as I finish and go back through!

I’ve been revisiting Pressfield’s The War of Art and have a few observations about it I mean to share, but I’ve got to get to some writing.

 

 

 

Pulp Virtues

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of the treasures I had in the form of one-of-a-kind pulp adventure books. In amongst the mad rush of promotions week and holiday activities, I’ve escaped into some of those adventure tales to relax.

Pulp magazines have a pretty bad reputation, and I have to say that it is fairly well deserved. A lot of what they printed is pretty dreadful, and some of what passes for exciting popular entertainment in one era leaves a pretty bad taste in another. Take the story “Death’s Domain” shown in the picture to my left. Wow, was it a cracking good mystery story with all sorts of eerie elements… until the final third, when it became the most astonishing “beat you over the head with ugly race hatred” tale I’ve yet found in my pulp adventure reading. I’m pretty good at looking past stories as a product of their time and still enjoying them, but the depiction of… well, never mind.

My point is that I want to focus on some of the stuff these pulps did right, not what a lot of them did wrong. For instance, I recently read though a minor Argosy tale of the Yukon titled “Mail Boat” by Frank Richardson Pierce. Owing to the way I inherited these stories, and the fact that I do not have an index to Argosy, I am unsure as to when the tale first appeared, but it is by a writer I’d never read, and it is fairly minor.

It is also short, so I kept reading despite it’s somewhat wooden character depictions. I would describe the writing as “workman-like.” Yet, by the end, it got me thinking about writing more than the last several of these pulp tales I’ve read.

Filling the Notebook

Well, I finally did it.

Usually I fill up one of my Paperblanks notebooks in one year, but this time it took a year and a half. The back half of the notebook on the left there is full of various scribblings related to the third Dabir and Asim novel and my second Paizo novel. Both have changed a lot since their initial conception.

The Next Big Thing

A couple of weeks ago my friend Violette Malan invited me to participate in The Next Big Thing Blog Series, which would involve my answering a set of questions. What with all of the family health issues hanging over my head I’m a few days later than I intended to be, but here are my answers.

You’ll find Violette’s blog post for the series here. If you haven’t read any of her work, I have a sneaking suspicion that most of my site’s visitors would be interested in her Dhulyn and Parno adventures.

Right, so here are my answers to the questions.

Harold Lamb’s Adventure Fiction

In discussion of my influences I always mention the writer Harold Lamb, but it’s a sad truth that he’s still little known today. That wasn’t always true. A few generations ago he was one of the most popular writers in one of the best (and most respected) of all pulp magazines, Adventure. Later in life his biographies and histories were award winning and well-regarded, and he was considered such an expert on the Middle-East that the state department sometimes consulted with him.

Once I discovered just how consistently excellent Lamb’s adventure fiction was it was my dream that it would be brought properly  into print, and I am extremely proud to have been intimately involved in making that happen through the Bison Books imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

There are several things that drew me to Lamb’s fiction. When I was young it was the headlong pace and the exotic settings, so exotic, as L.  Sprague de Camp once wrote, Lamb might as well have been writing of Burroughs’ Mars. But Lamb wasn’t inventing his setting, he was enmeshed in a great deal of research at a time when detailed research meant mastering other languages and journeying to distant lands and libraries.

Counting Down

In the next few weeks I’ll be receiving my copies of The Bones of the Old Ones. It’s one thing to hold the advanced reader’s copy. It’s another completely to be holding the actual book with the final cover, the corrected text, the corrected cover copy with blurbs and a few reviews that came in immediately before the book went to press, and I’m looking forward to that.

I wish that the covers didn’t head off for printing quite so early, because it would have been nice to have the starred review from Publisher’s Weekly on the cover, but if I could make things come true by snapping my fingers I guess that would be a little further down the list than, say, world peace or honest politicians.

Music to Write of Arabia

I’ve held various career plans over the years, beginning with my ambition to be a double-nought spy, a starship captain, or another Beatle. I also wanted to be a writer from an early age, a goal that seemed just about as superheroically awesome as the others.

By the time I was in college I was still gigging around in local rock bands and writing, and I had it in my head I might be able to make a go of it as a composer. There’s only so much time in every day, and every life, though, and eventually writing won out over music, just as getting a film degree won out over a degree in music theory. These days I only sit down at the piano occasionally to amuse myself, but I do keep my hand in composing by drafting themes for my characters.Sometimes I sit down and play a character theme song before I start my writing day.

I’ve thought about subjecting the wider world to a recording of the Dabir and Asim theme song, but I think it would sound a lot better with all the orchestration I hear in my head rather than just having me pound it out on the piano, and besides, I’m busy, so it’s never been recorded.

But enough about me! Today I wanted to share the CD I listen to while driving around town and thinking about the ancient Middle-East.

I’ve Got a Star!

I woke up yesterday to discover I’d gotten a starred review at Publisher’s Weekly. Well, not me, but my next book, The Bones of the Old Ones!

Here’s a nice quote from the opening paragraph: “This rousing sequel to The Desert of Souls offers a mélange of ancient adventure myths populated by convincing, endearing characters.”

And here’s another one: “… fills the pages with gallantry and glamour to provide a thrilling spectacle. ”

So this is all quite nice. It in no way changes the fact I’m sitting in the intensive care unit of a hospital wishing there was something more I could to to help my mom recover, but it means that a smile occasionally crosses my face as I mostly worry. And she smiled when I told her about all this. Even when she’s feeling rotten, she’s happy for me.

The Bones of the Old Ones can be pre-ordered (it’s not out until December 11). But you probably knew that. Just click on the link to get to the order page on my own site, or visit Amazon, B&N, BAM,Indie book stores, Powell‘s, or many other locations.

The Writing Life

Things have been a little more quite on the web site here as they’ve gotten busier in the real world. I’m involved in promotional efforts for The Bones of the Old Ones— far more time consuming than I would have realized a few years back — and I’m putting a polish on the first two-thirds of the third Dabir and Asim novel. I wish I was polishing all of it, but I don’t have all of it written.

As of this weekend, though, I must switch gears to begin work on my next Pathfinder Tales book for Paizo. As I’ll be busy with that for several months, I don’t want to come back to a bunch of messy first draft pages on book 3 of Dabir and Asim (with plot arcs that fizzle, character names that change, and long slow bits that don’t go anywhere) so I’ve spent several weeks shoring things up and doing some tweaking.

It may be because of my work on the upcoming Pathfinder novel, but I’ve been feeling a real itch to do some gaming. Or it may be because I’m feeling a little stressed and need to decompress. The sitcom stereotype is, of course, that when women get stressed they go shopping for clothes. Me, I open up the closet of cool strategy and tactical boardgames I never get to play because I’m always so busy, and sigh longingly.