Retreat, Day 20

This is a hard post to write, because I tend to keep my private life offline. Your attitude shapes your reality, and so I don’t dwell on the bad stuff. And going on and on about your problems is something readers/followers can get tired of when it’s going on day after day.

But sometimes bad stuff happens. Sometimes you’re dealing with a loved one’s illness, or your own, or a natural disaster, or something else, because the world is one filled with tragedies, large and small.

Earlier this year a relative was diagnosed with cancer. It wasn’t the first time ““ she’d had a bout five years ago ““ but this time there were a lot of words that were ominous, including chemotherapy.

And so, last month, this month, the next few months I’m working at getting my first novel launched and worrying desperately about its reception and writing the second one, and at the same time, trying to give her the support she needs. I take my laptop to the hospital, where they have excellent wireless, and I keep picking away at things.

I have always have a healthy sense (some might say too healthy) of humor and a disinclination towards taking myself seriously. Both have stood me in good stead here, but I can tell I’m stressed, nonetheless. I find myself, more than anything, filled with surges of anger at time. At the world, at cancer, even at my poor relative. I find myself sometimes lost, sometimes doing things unlike myself, or even irrational or forgetful, a thing that scares me, because my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and that’s always been one of my secret fears. Other times I find myself sad and lonely and so full of self-pity it oozes out of my ears in a most unbecoming way.

There’s other stuff going on, and I don’t want to talk about it because it’s matters that are private for other people. But I can tell you this, from the heart of anger and sorrow and a life that is currently chaotic, it is still ““ for me ““ possible to write and what’s more, to take parts of what’s going on and make it into stories. And it helps. It helps you make sense of it. It helps you achieve distance.

We go to stories to find out what to do. How to be human. What we can expect and what’s expected of us in turn. If you have something to say about that, then write a story about it. That’s worth a thousand angry or preachy blog posts, in my opinion. If you don’t like the art someone is creating, don’t worry about theirs but go and make your own.

Go sing your song, and if you do, the universe will sing through you. And that, my loves, is the best sustenance for the battered and beleaguered soul that I know of.

Collaborations can be a lot of fun. My first collaboration came about when Jeff VanderMeer asked if I’d be interested in working together on one and tossed me a 1500 word lump that would end up becoming “The Surgeon’s Tale.” That story remains among one of my favorite pieces of writing, in part because reading back through it evokes the pleasure of batting it back and forth, adding thousand or so word chunks each time, until it ended up in the land of the novelette. I think we managed to make the final result pretty seamless – I have trouble remembering who wrote some bits, although others stand out clearly in my head as Jeff’s or mine, because I remember first reading them or spinning them out.

I haven’t done that many. “Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lift” with Ben Burgis resulted from Ben describing what he wanted to write a story about — Miami and were gators and coke dealers — at more than one Wiscon. I wrote the beginning and sent it his way, and the back and forth began. Now we’ve got a similar lump in process.

Gio Clairval and I just finished up a flash piece recently. One of the things I’ve done to encourage collaborations is stick a bunch of word lumps up in a Google doc and just shared the doc so people could take a look and see if anything sparked. She liked a piece I’d done based on an image of a female acrobat.

Right now Bud Sparhawk and I just finished the novella “Haunted,” which started as a short story and kept growing and growing and growing. Bud plots things out a bit more thoroughly than I do, and it’s been interesting so far. Here we worked in Scrivener and laid out a story arc in cards before really setting to writing. I enjoyed it, because I think we’ve got a killer idea, and some clever twists, and some things that will hit nostalgic sweetspots.

So here’s my advice on collaboration based on my experience, which is somewhere past utterly new at it and yet not in the range of people like Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, Mike Resnick, and countless more.

• Pick a collaborator whose speed (roughly) matches yours. Bud was writing faster on ours, and I know there were several times where I was the holdup. Too much of that can get frustrating, as I’m sure he can attest.
• Pick a collaborator who doesn’t take things too seriously (and don’t do that yourself). If someone has got something (real or imagined) at stake, the pressure may be uncomfortable.
• Pick a collaborator who is flexible, and similarly be prepared yourself to sacrifice cherished ides, because you can always use them elsewhere.

Collaborative benefits include (for me, at least) new energy, someone to discuss a story with as it’s written, new insights into process, fresh ideas, and a kick in the butt to be productive.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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