People I know write things: Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

I know a lot of very nice, very talented people. Enough that I'm going to start highlighting when one of them goes and gets something published.

First up is Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, whom I know from Stonecoast, and who may have the best name of any genre writer ever. A new story of hers, The Siren, has just been posted over at Strange Horizons. You should follow this link now and read it.

It occurs to me as I write this that I should go back in time a bit and write about some other folks I know who've published books, actual, real books, in the recent past. Soon, my pet, soon...

I've been a bad blogger

After having promised to write about my experience at my final Stonecoast residency, I've found myself without reliable wifi since I left the Portland airport. I guess I'll have to catch up once I get home. Sorry.

In the meantime, have a picture of some of my MFA buddies as we walked to lunch yesterday.

One last Stonecoast

In a little less than 24 hours, I'll be boarding a plane to head out to Maine for my last Stonecoast residency. Stonecoast being the MFA program I've been attending for the last two years. Next week I will graduate and I shall be a master of all fine arts.

I've written little about the experience of completing an MFA, and less about attending an actual residency. It occurred to me that I should document this last trip for posterity. Who knows, maybe someone out there will actually think this is interesting.

For today, I'll link to an older entry where I explained why I wanted to get a creative writing MFA in the first place.

See you all again tomorrow.

Words, words, words

I've really had my head down lately in an attempt to get some stuff done before Baby 2.0 arrives at the end of June/beginning of July. Let's see, there's homework to be done (two papers to write, a bunch of books to read for the next residency); I've started to meet with a friend whom I hope will be the producer of the short film I plan to make next semester, and I've been trying to get a lot done on the web comic I'm trying to get off the ground. The novel I started working on is going to sit and marinate for a while. Something had to give way and that seemed like the easiest thing to set aside.

The web comic is really taking shape on paper. I've never worked this quickly on a comics project. Last week I wrote a pitch document that included character descriptions, a description of the world and the general shape of the story. I also plotted out and scripted the first chapter of the book (26 pages!) and got all of that to the artist. Best of all, he likes what I've written and didn't ask for any changes. This is a rare and magical occurrence. Over the last two days I've worked out a very basic plot of the rest of the first book (in a perfect world this will be a story told in three volumes). I wanted to work far ahead on this project because come the arrival of the baby, I'll probably have to set it aside for a while. I want the artist to have lots of material to work with while I settle into my new life. Also, the more material there is, the easier it will be for me to hit the ground running when I get back to the project. I think I'm at a place where I can leave it alone for a while and concentrate on homework.

Thanks for indulging me and my sporadic updates. As a reward, have a video of Jenny Owen Youngs performing one of my favorite of her songs live. Take it away, Jenny.

The residency so far

My first packet of homework is due on February 7. All I have left to do is finish reading one book (less than fifty pages) and then write a reading response to it. So why do I feel like I'm already so far behind?

Part of it is that I wanted to have reread and cleaned up the Zomburbia manuscript by the first of the month. Unless a miracle occurs, that won't happen. There are also three short stories for me to rewrite. Two that I submit to publishers, and one that I will send to Jim Kelly. Jim workshopped this story with me at the latest Stonecoast residency and he's offered to look at it again once it's rewritten. He thinks it's publishable. Have I mentioned that Jim is a hell of a guy?

I also have a ton of email I still need to answer from when I was in Maine.

One of these days I'll feel like I'm caught up.

Gone educatin'

In a little while I'll be off to Maine where an army of instructors shall try and penetrate my dense head bones in an attempt to fill my brain with knowledge. While I am away in the Winter Wonderland that is Maine, posts of any length will be in short supply here. However, since I learned last night how to publish photos to this blog from my phone, you can probably expect a sort of photo travelogue of my journey.

See you in a couple of weeks!

Cooperation!

Something I've never done before is to collaborate on a piece of writing. That may be changing. If I'm lucky.

I have a friend who also writes comics on occasion. He contacted me out of the blue last month to tell me that he had an artist who was interested in working with him to put together a comics pitch. They both know an editor at a large comics publisher and wanted to work up something to pitch to him specifically. My writer friend worried that he didn't have enough time to work on anything by himself, so he wrote to me and asked if I'd like to write something with him. For a number of reason -- the chance to work with my friend, the chance to be published by this particular company -- I said yes.

I thought that we would just be working on an idea that he had come up with, but he and the artist had not actually settled on an idea yet, so I was asked to contribute some ideas as well. My friend then put the four best ideas, two from him and two from me, into one list and sent it off to the artist. I just heard back from my friend today and it turns out the artist picked one of my ideas. I won! General congratulations and back slapping for me...

And now I feel the pressure to deliver since it was my idea that was chosen. *sigh*

And the idea? In a nutshell, t's about Mexican wrestlers, Aztec death gods and general mayhem and untra-violence. You know, the usual...

More updates as the situation warrants, of course. Oh, and this is the comics project that I wrote about on occasion last month. It'll be interesting to fit in even more writing with everything that's going on now, and everything that I know is coming down the pike in the near future.

Wish me luck.

Stonecoast and lots of numbers

For those of you who are unaware, I started a writing MFA program, Stonecoast, this Summer. I know I've mentioned it in this space a few times and I wanted to write about it at more length now that I've just completed the first semester of work. First I'll talk about my intentions in following the grad school route, and then I'll assess what I think I've accomplished this semester. Finally, tacked on to the end in an ungainly manner, I'll run the numbers on what I wrote over the last few months. Sounds fun, right?

First, what I wasn't expecting by attending an MFA program. I don't think writing that leads to publishing can be taught. I certainly had no belief that I would be handed a magical set of rules that, once followed, led to me becoming the next Stephen King. I think that lots of writing and re-writing is the only thing that can lead to publication.

And that's one of the big reasons I wanted to go back to school. Time. I'll admit that last year when I was considering applying to grad school , I was feeling more than a little lost. I had been a stay-at-home dad for two years and while that was great, and continues to be great, it was not how I defined myself. I'd always thought of myself as a writer. Only I wasn't doing much writing. Since 2003, when my first professionally published comic came out, comics was the medium through which I channeled my creativity. There was no comics work. Several proposals had been rejected and no one was exactly knocking down my door to submit more. I knew that the entire industry was in an economic downturn, but that didn't really help boost my ego.

It occurred to me then that I should get back to writing prose. Writing comics had seemed like a sideline back when I was first published, but then it became my sole focus. So, prose. I tried a couple of times to write longer prose pieces -- I've never cared much for writing short stories, though I seem to be developing a taste for them now. But it was hard to find a focus. I struggled for more than a year with one piece, got about 150 pages and then stalled out when my computer suffered a hard drive crash that was unrepairable. After I calmed down about so much wasted work, it was almost a relief. I've since recovered that word document and can't bring myself to go back and reread it to see if it can be salvaged. I may need to just consign it to the dustbin of history, as it were.

I thought that a writing program of some sort might be just what I needed. It would get me back into the habit of writing prose and it would impose a deadline to do so. Perfect. And while I don't believe you can teach someone to write, I did think that a grad program would have other benefits. Among these, I'd be exposed to a group of writing professional and I would get their critiques of my work, I'd meet and (I hoped) become friends with peers who were in the same situation as me, and I would learn from those who had already gone through the process of getting published the ins and outs of the business. Of those three the second, meeting peers, was most important to me. Living where I do, I feel sometimes like I'm living in a creative vacuum. It's been nice to have people I can reach out to via email or facebook and know that they are sharing a similar experience.

Once I decided that a writing program is what I wanted, I had to decide which one. I interviewed a couple of writers who had been through MFAs. They told me the same thing -- an observation borne out on various websites and in interviews I've read. As soon as I told them that I wanted to write genre fiction, their reply was that I would have a difficult time finding a program that would work with me. Most MFA programs are welcoming of non-genre, or literary, fiction and don't know what to do with genre. And even if a program said they'd work with you, I was told, I would find that that statement was designed just to get me in the door. Once there, I'd find an environment hostile to genre fiction. This was discouraging to say the least, and it led to me putting the idea on the back burner for a while.

I was toying with the idea of applying to the Clarion Writers' Workshop, an intensive six-week long "boot camp" for writers, when I heard a radio interview with Kelly Link. Ms Link is a phenomenal writer of surreal short stories and a recent favorite of mine. In the interview she was asked what work she did besides writing and she said that she taught at the Stonecoast MFA. That sent me running to the Internet to look up the program. Like every MFA in the country, Stonecoast has disciplines in Fiction, Non-fiction, and Poetry. What makes them unique is that they also offer a concentration in Popular Fiction (read: Genre Fiction). It didn't take me long to decide that I wanted to go there. And it was the only program to which I applied. If I had not been accepted, I would have taken it as a sign that I wasn't meant to go to grad school and I needed to find another way to advance my writing. I am so happy that I got accepted.

I was even happier when, a few months ago, Poets and Writers magazine named Stonecoast one of the top ten low-residency MFA programs in the country. What, I hear you asking, does low-residency mean? A full-residency program is one which holds classes every day. You stop your life to attend, move to the city where the college is located, etc. A low-res program just means it's part-time. Twice a year I go to Maine for two weeks to attend classes, lectures, and workshops. The rest of the time, I'm at home doing the required homework. I mail off five packets over the six months of the semester and communicate with my advisor (in the program they are called "mentors") over the phone or via email. It's all self-directed and self-motivating so it's really a case of sink or swim for the students.

Which leads to the section where I talk about what I've accomplished. One of the unexpected results of being accepted -- a real sense of urgency to my writing. Seriousness. Fucking gravitas. Let me give you an example using the novel I just finished. In the four months before I started the MFA program, I wrote just 12,500 words -- that's 56 pages. After starting the program in mid-July through the beginning of December -- about four and a half months -- I wrote an additional 91,000 words. That's just shy of 400 pages. And I didn't use the novel toward the page count for my homework. It far exceeded what the school's handbook says to send to the advisors on a monthly basis. I wrote and sent in short stories. If there was a day when I didn't write, I felt bad about myself.

And I wasn't the only person affected by this. Paying for an MFA program makes your family and friends take your writing very seriously. Suddenly my writing became a priority.

I also feel like I've gained confidence in my writing. The comments I received in workshop last July, and the critiques from my advisor, have really boosted my ego -- in a good way. And, not to worry, I'm still getting some fairly humbling responses as well.

Now that I've completed a draft of my novel, I feel like my experience at Stonecoast will be different. Next semester I see myself devoting myself to rewriting the novel and not devoting so much time to writing new material. I'll probably write enough just to satisfy the packet requirements and then use the rest of my time on the rewrites. I want to get this thing polished up and to an agent as soon as possible. I want to see if it's publishable.

And now the numbers:

Last numbers dump of the semester. Here is what I've been doing for the last five months.

As I mentioned, I wrote 91,000 words on my novel. In addition, I also wrote three-and-a-half short stories and a short film script. There was also a new comics proposal thrown in their as well.

Short story A: 8,026

Short story B: 8,682

Short story C: 5,319

Short story D: 5,089 (so far)

Short film: 2,008 (an 11-page script)

Comics project: 1,516

That gives us a grand total of 121, 640 words for the semester. That's 486 pages. Not bad. I guess I don't feel too bad about slowing down through this month (which is all about preparing for the next residency) and the next semester. Come next July, though, I bet I'll be ready to get back on that horse.

I already have an idea for a second novel...

Statement of intention

October felt like a lost month somehow. I rewrote a couple of stories and did manage to write some new material on my novel, but I was nowhere near as productive as I should have been (nowhere near as productive as I'd been in August and September). So, I figured I'd use this space to publicly state my goal for the month.

I plan to write a thousand words a day this month. Every day. That's 30,000 words for the month. There. Plan on a lot of little entries on the blog this month updating my progress. I think I'll have time for little else. I still have reading to do for my MFA, and reading responses. And we just got our list of seminars for the next residency in January and those all have reading to be done for them as well. November and December will be very busy months for me.

So, to start the month off right, here's my daily update.

Words for the day: 1,012

Words for the month: 1,012

Wish me luck.

Workshop

Today I sent off my second packet of stories that will be workshopped at the Stonecoast residency in January. Stonecoast being the MFA in creative writing program I am attending. I am completing? Which has taken over my life? One of those is the correct usage, I'm not sure which.

This time around, I submitted a short prose story and a script for a short film. Both of them feature the same protagonist. That means something, but what exactly scares me. I'm three-quarters of the way through the novel I'm writing (give or take) and some part of my brain keeps telling me that this character will be the main character of the next one that I write. I keep telling my brain to shut up and let me finish the book in front of me, but it doesn't listen.

Anyway, I'm surprised by how much more confident I feel about my writing after just a few months in the program. Whether or not that confidence is earned I can't say. But I know that six months ago when I submitted my first ;packet for workshop, I was a nervous wreck. I convinced myself that I was deluded if I thought my pieces, the first two chapters from my novel, were up to snuff. I don't have any of those fears now. Not that I'm convinced I'm the second coming of Ernest Hemingway or anything. I just think I've written solid stories that will become better once they've been workshopped. Feeling confident about my writing is a new feeling for me. It's one I could get used to.

Another reason for me to be excited this residency is that I get to workshop with two amazing writers, Mike Kimball and James Patrick Kelly. Mike is my advisor/mentor this semester so I know that his comments will be thorough (I restrained myself from typing "brutal") and helpful in the extreme. I've never worked with or met James, but I've read some of his short fiction, which I liked, and I know he teaches at Clarion, so I'm expecting great things.

Reading over this, I realize I should probably write more about both the MFA program and about the novel. I won't do that tonight, but I will soon. Can you stand the suspense?