As I noted on my News page, World Fantasy Award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer has temporarily turned over his blog Ecstatic Days to his wife Ann, the new editor of Weird Tales, and she has invited upcoming WT authors to write guest blog posts. My guest post should run on Jeff’s blog sometime late next week, around Dec. 27th. I rambled for a few paragraphs about why, even though I’m a scientist, I prefer writing fantasy. So check it out next week–great for curing or intensifying those holiday hangovers. I will pry myself off the sofa and announce it here when it does run.

To celebrate the premiere issue under new editor Ann VanderMeer, Weird Tales magazine is running a trial subscription offer at half price. It’s three issues for $10–view all the details here. If you act soon, you could get the first issue of Ms. VanderMeer’s editorship, #347, which has my short story “Excision” in it. There is also a brand-new Michael Moorcock Elric novella scheduled for early next year. For my money, Elric is the most interesting sword & sorcery hero because he’s actually an angst-ridden antihero. I’m very curious, given Ms. VanderMeer’s literary background, to see how the magazine evolves under her lead. There are plenty of magazines for literary fantasy, but not many at all for “normal” fantasy written with a literary sensibility.

This trial offer ends Dec. 21, so snatch it up before it’s gone. I did.

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write…. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think.

Kelly Link, Locus, Nov. 2007

This quotation, from award-winning author Kelly Link, immediately caught my eye because I work the same way.

My writing process is extremely lengthy. I usually spend 4-6 weeks outlining a short story, including the world, the plot, the characters and their arcs. During semesters when I’m not teaching, that’s 4-6 weeks of working all day, so that’s 20-30 days of outlining, before I write a single sentence.

A lot of that time is spent just sitting in a chair thinking about things–characters, the opening, plot points, the flavor of the world. Sometimes I’ll look up at the end of the day and realize I only have one page of new notes from that day–one page for 8 hours of work! But thinking through things this way is invaluable for me. It helps me spot inconsistencies or logic gaps before I’ve wasted time writing them. I think it also helps spontaneous ideas bubble to the surface. I was struggling for an ending to a piece recently; then I suddenly wondered, what if the character had his face melted off? It turned out to be perfect for that story. This pondering seems the same thing that Kelly means by “boredom.” For me it’s not ennui or anything; just that state of “stillness,” as she calls it, while I think through all these components of the story.

As she also mentions, I too find doing other things to be a great “recharger.” I build furniture and electric guitars, so I spend lots of time doing detailed woodwork. My workshop has no clock–each task takes as long as it takes, and it’s done when the results are acheived. It’s relaxing because it’s manual work rather than mental. The work is also done only for me, not for commission or for some editor to arbitrarily judge. I find all of those differences very refreshing. Sometimes when the weather is nice, I’ll take 2-3 or even 4 days off from writing and work on a guitar.

From Kelly’s quotation, it sounds like she works a similar way. I spoke to her at ReaderCon a few years ago. Her fiction isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I respect that she’s established herself while writing in a new subgenre of fantasy, so she really had to establish both that and herself at the same time. I also love that she’s giving back to the field in general and to that new subgenre with her small press, publishing books and a magazine. So it was rather cool to find out that she works the same languid way that I do, by embracing the boredom as the silence before the creative storm.

It’s Friday, and despite a fusillade of rejection letters earlier in the week, I’m feeling rather good because I finished the first draft of a new story yesterday. It’s short, for me at least, and it’s not stunningly original because it’s a pastiche of a classic but unknown fantasy author. It’s also at this point destined for a private publishing venture instead of the usual markets.

The neat thing that I realized after finishing it was how liberating all of those constraints ended up being. I didn’t need to outline because I followed the structure of the story I was satirizing. I didn’t need to worldbuild a society because the story moved quickly through only a few locales. The antiquated narrative voice perfectly fit the more pompous and baroque side of my own. I usually stretch the literal connotations of language, which many readers aren’t spry enough to follow. For this story I embraced that whole-hog, even to the point of inventing new words. And because the story won’t go through traditional submission channels, I had no nagging worry that some editor would get snarky at my poetics.

My first-reader thought the story came out very well. I’ll get another critique or two, then see where it stands. But at that point, I’m quite curious to see if this completely off-the-cuff effort might actually seize an editor’s interest. That would be hilarious, and quite a comment on this less restrained process. Who knows–stranger things have happened….