I wrote this instead of fiction for 1000 Words of Summer
Hello friend,
It is 1000 Words of Summer time, and I'm having a really hard time with it. Don't worry, this doesn't mean I'm defeated or sad. Instead, it's that getting to a thousand words each day has ended up surprisingly grueling, seeing me writing into my late-night hours more than once. This is ok if it's fun and gliding, if I already finished what I wanted that day and am continuing for the pleasure of it; less so if it's 2:30 am and I'm staring at a 774-word count for the day, wondering where the hell those last 226 words might come from.
A thousand words is my usual daily goal for fiction things, though I don't stick with it when it's punishing. I like a thousand words, but a recent long, exciting, difficult conference day meant 300 words was better, so I wrote 300 words and called that a heroic effort. But I'm a former honor student who can't resist a challenge that supports my goals, so I'm doing 1000 Words of Summer, except it means I'm drafting when I actually want to be revising.
This is a surprising turn of events. Drafting is usually my very most favorite, to the point that I still ask myself sometimes if I'd prefer to just write first drafts forever and show no one and be content. And, irritatingly, the answer continues to be no. I was reminded of this recently in a class I took through Hugo House called Creative Apothecary (magic, I swear). For one class, we were tasked with asking someone who knew our work well to describe it and what they thought we were trying to do.
People have read my zines - lots of people, even! And as I've become a Person Who Does Conference Talks (still a shock to the system, I tell you), the voice from both parts of my creative life is really similar: you can do this, I believe in you, we can do cool shit, and we're all capable of so many things. Also, isn't the world weird sometimes? And I think the same voice threads through my fiction, but since I'm not writing self-help, it necessarily emerges a little differently. The business cards I made for AWP 2022 say "Stories about funny nerds and better universes, mostly" (and I tell you, figuring that out was quite the exercise in character constraint and self evaluation). I think that tracks with what I say in other forms too. It's just woven a little differently; think macrame vs. a knitted house for which I also sheared the sheep and spun the yarn.
I used that metaphor last week, when I found myself in the unlikely but recently more frequent situation of telling tech people how to write. I said, "A lot of people start a project envisioning the final version and then only see where the day's efforts fall short, but I want to reassure you that the goal in a first draft isn't the dress, and it isn't even the muslin version of the pattern and sometimes not even the cloth. The first draft is unspun cotton, and that's all it has to be."
A lot's happened since my March newsletter. I went to AWP with https://buttondown.email/optionalbutencouraged/archive/describing-and-creating-reality-word-by-word/ and relearned the hard way how it works to talk to strangers, but of course it was the most memorable and worthwhile part of the whole venture. After two years of involuntary social reduction, coming away from an event like that with two new friends means everything. Other wonderful possibilities came from it too, but just the friend stuff would've been enough reason to fly across the country.
I've thought of AWP a lot this week because I've once again needed to weigh risk in the face of opportunity. I gave a talk at BSides SF, my first in-person talk in 28 months, and then signed books. A couple days later, at the (aggrieved sigh) mask-optional RSA Conference, I got to be on a panel talking about THE WHOLE-ASS BOOK I'M PART OF (free download here, paper copies here) followed by two more signings. I evaluated it and judged that, for my own wants and risks, it was worth chancing it, particularly since I'm quite comfortable at this point being the only masked person in a crowd.
I can tell you: signing books that I contributed to ranks as one of the greatest happinesses of my life. Seeing people excited about our work, hearing how psyched people were to learn it existed, witnessing an hour-long line for signatures and copies? I still feel the sublime joy of it in my bones.
Several days out, the rapid tests still say I'm negative, and I don't have symptoms. BSides, bless them, had the same policies as AWP: vax and masks required, my favorite recipe for an indoor outing. But RSA brought opportunities, and I opted to risk paying the price.
I wish I hadn't had to. Other people wouldn't be able to take the chance and didn't. Are they less deserving of opportunities for it? I don't think so.
As you probably noticed via the all caps, yes, I'm part of a cybersecurity anthology, which satisfied my 2022 goal of getting some of my writing out there. I had pictured it as "query or self-publish fiction," and then I had the fantastic luck of being part of this instead. Along with being part of a remarkably accomplished group of fellow authors, it proved to me that I can write something like this. I wrote a technical book chapter! And while I would not say it was easy, because writing an 8,000-word chunk of thought in one very intense weekend is never going to be easy unless you are more prone to amphetamine use than I am (which is not prone at all; you're reading the words of someone who makes third-caff coffee at home because half-caff is too potent), but it felt more like I imagine a practiced runner does when moving from a 5k to a half-marathon.
(This is some heavy imagining by the way; I recently started running again, and my goal is 20 minutes, which do not have to be continuous. It, uh, does not come naturally to these bones.)
My writing weekend was hard for sure, and dishes got neglected (always my first tell of when I'm overloaded), but it felt good. It felt like I was doing something I'd been aiming for all along.
Hey, look, a thousand words, emerging as easily as anything pleasurable does.
The last couple of months, in addition to conference things, also saw me finish a first-draft sci-fi novel in a new universe. I had the stub of an idea last year, but I began writing on it in earnest on the first of this year. I finished on Memorial Day, so now I know I can create a whole thing in five months. It ended up a necessarily bloated draft, 121,000 words because I had to write up the world and past things and other stuff that will be condensed to references and smaller flashbacks. I am not afraid of this revision, and that is progress.
Here are some things I've written or liked.
- Read the Fantastic Manual: How to Write Security Documentation People Will Actually Read, the blog post version of my BSides SF talk. I will tell you a secret: while this is a security talk for a security conference, it's actually about teaching people, and written to be relevant to lots of fields.
- My chapter, "Your Greatest Vuln: a Culture of No" in Reinventing Cybersecurity. It's on page 143 of the book. I did not have to look that up.
- Conference Travel! Philadelphia and AWP 2022, March 19-26 on Deviation Obligatoire. Of AWP, pandemic-era socializing, and cheesesteaks.
- Goddamned Beautiful made me so happy
- Alissa Nutting Quarantines with Anthropomorphic Cereal gave me Patricia Lockwood feelings in that I came away thinking could I just hang out in your brain sometimes please and thank you
- I flew through some books lately: The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting by K.J. Charles, the Cabot books by Cat Sebastian, Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik, and To Marry and to Meddle by Martha Waters. Yep, still on the romance kick. The world still hurts too much to read things without a guaranteed happily ever after. Maybe I'm just like this from now on. Fortunately, the books are very very good, so it's not a problem.
And finally, a sentence I've written recently that I liked: “Actual human faces.” Sumner rolled his eyes. “Because we never can infer their existence until one of them lays their guts and pain out for all of us to examine and see if it’s worthy.”
The emotional lead-up to presenting a talk has become very predictable to me. I'm excited to have an idea I think is good and especially excited to have it accepted to a conference. Then I mostly enjoy turning it into an actual talk, but a couple of weeks before presenting, the dread comes in. Oh god, why do I agree to things, what I could have said was nothing, oh no oh no. It intensifies up until the moment I give the talk and then... mostly... it falls away. It gets a little easier every time; in this case, about five minutes into the talk, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to be just fine." And I was, and people said lots of very kind things, and it all felt so worth it. Especially when followed immediately by a book signing that came to be directly through my speaking work. I got to be on a panel last summer with the now-friend who headed the project, and because she knew I could write and speak about these things, she thought of me when she was assembling her contributor list.
"Why do I agree to things" thus gets a pretty immediate answer these days. Because I love them when they're done; because they've taken me to fantastic places I couldn't have dreamed of otherwise. (And I just got the acceptance notice for another talk, so some new possibilities are just beginning to unfold.)
I wish you a month (or few) of opportunities you couldn't have imagined and beautiful rewards for your brave moments. Thanks for sticking with me.