Hi everyone! It’s been a minute since I dropped by, and I’m sorry about that. The launch of LAST EXIT was a bit of an Event over here at Happyrock Industries—interviews, support, and honestly more exposure to the continual stream of the social feeds, by way of launch support, than generally leads to good cognitive outcomes on this end. You know how it goes—you give Mark Zuckerberg a cookie—or wait, no, is it that you let Mark give you a cookie?—anyway, cookies happen, and at some point someone’s been drowned in milk.
I’ve been so thrilled by the response to this book. The launch effort prompted a few pieces of formal writing from me, which may interest you:
Exit Pursued, on the Tor Forge blog, about the writing process of Last Exit.
A piece on how I came up with the idea for the book, for the Big Idea series at John Scalzi’s blog.
Last Exit to Playlist, likewise on the Tor Forge blog, takes as its jumping off point an actual playlist I assembled way back during the first draft.
Also, this massive Q&A on Reddit’s r/fantasy community features a lot of me talking about Last Exit, about the Craft Sequence, and the process of writing more generally. There were great questions here—and more than a few answers that could have been entire essays for this newsletter all their own. You’ll find a couple highlights if you search that page for ‘individualism,’ and ‘promises and seductions.’ (Though the latter contains spoilers for… all my books so far, I think, but especially for Last Exit.)
I’ve also been playing with my next project, through COVID-related child care closures and the general forward march of time. I wrote ‘grinding down on,’ rather than ‘playing with,’ in the last sentence, before I deleted it—I wrote it because that is the reflexive way I put things, and I deleted it because it doesn’t match the feeling I’m trying to cultivate as I work right now—or, thankfully, how I feel about the work most of the time at this moment. As Butcher Ding says: plenty of room to play about!
This reframing traces back to Isabel Sterling’s charming (and, thank the Light, short) podcast called the Author Burnout Coach, which I’ve been listening to on the recommendation of Stephanie Burgess (if ‘necromancer romantic comedy’ sounds up your alley, and it probably does because you’re here, do yourself a favor and read her extremely charming Good Neighbors stories). It’s been helpful as I try to accommodate myself to the new realties of my work, between parenting and the ongoing (and, y’all, it really is ongoing) pandemic. I don’t find everything in the podcast resonant, but you can very easily take what you like.
One suggestion that I have found useful, is: rather than focusing on daily targets for writing (or other creative work), consider a daily minimum, and make that target extremely low and achievable, the kind of thing you could trip and stumble and still accomplish. If your goal is, “touch the manuscript,” or “write a sentence,” and you feel good for achieving that goal, it’s easy to slip past and write a page, or more, because at that point you’re just playing around! But if your goal is “three thousand words,” and you can’t drive yourself across that line, then you’ve failed. And, especially if you’re under pressure in other areas of your life, that feeling of failure—or, rather, the shame we feel after we fail—can form a sort of plaque that’s easy to ignore until it breaks you, and hard to scrape off your soul once it’s progressed that far.
I’ve tended in the past to adopt a ‘sustainable daily target’ work model, which I do think has its advantages when it comes to one’s ability to project deadlines and so forth, but the key word here, which we all forget to our peril, is ‘sustainable.’ What that means changes drastically with our circumstances, and these days, may change daily. In the Before Times, I could, more or less dependably, clock three thousand words in a work day without feeling that I had overextended myself. But I also had a lot more control over my work environment, including my psychological work environment, than, well, almost anyone who’s paying attention has had since March of ’20. My experience of the pandemic, as one of two working parents with no external child care from March ’20 to about July or so ’21, and periodically without since then, has been less Oregon Trail and more Patrick O’Brien—that is to say, you might want to plod on so many miles in a day like the most dependable of ox-carts, but no matter how carefully you plan or work, the winds may disagree. Or a storm throws you far off course. We tack, we trim, we sail with all our skill, we use the resources we have, we try to protect our time, we watch the stars—but if we only count the miles traveled, we don’t see the effort that may be required to make our way against headwinds.
Two recommendations, before I salute and sign off:
Our Flag Means Death—this is a goddamn wonderful piece of show, find a way to watch it. I was sold on episode one, back when it just looked like a pirate workplace comedy starring everyone’s favorite historical midlife crisis, Stede Bonnet. But, if the first episode doesn’t do it for you—and I can see how it might not, it strains to get across the full tonal range of the project and can at times feel like it’s wobbling on a tightrope—know that the full engine doesn’t come together until episode four or so, and it’s glorious when it does.
Elder Race—My first by Adrian Tchaikovsky and it won’t be my last. This is a gem—a tight high concept science fantasy novella about a warrior princess and a depressed posthuman “wizard”, a pair of heartbreaking character portraits, flawless pacing, in and out in about a hundred sixty pages. There are sequel hooks, but it also feels complete in a gratifying way.
Congrats on the Last Exit success!! So excited for you :)
I started reading your post and immediately thought "there is NO way Max doesn't mention Our Flag Means Death." Haven't seen it yet, but definitely planning on it.
I think a minimum daily target is such a good idea. My productivity and feeling good about writing have vastly vastly improved since I went from "I MUST COMPLETE CHAPTER X OF MY MASTERPIECE" to "I will do X amount of creative work today."
Hope you are doing as well as can be with the pandemic and I miss you!