Timothy Callahan

Is this the end?

I considered my writing to be a little bit more than a hobby, yet not exactly a career.  Sure, I wanted to be good at it and I worked hard at being good at it but I never thought I worked harder than say, a person who works on his car on the weekends. Or someone who works hard at a local dinner theater.  I write because it’s something I enjoy doing and if I succeed at it or make money off it, all the better.   

There are times when I work hard to get something published, it never happens, but I try.  I have gone the self-publishing route but really, I don’t have the time to promote my work as I should.  Maybe if I quit my job and worked at it full time I could get some publishing deals, but the truth is I’m not really brave enough to just go off and do something like that. 

I missed some chances when I was unemployed but to be honest I was more worried about getting a job than publishing anything.  Besides, all I had was one short novel that was good, but not great.  I did send it to places, heck I still send it places every once in a while, but so far no one has touched it. I can’t blame them, I’m not a popular name and agents and publishers want people who can make them money. I might be able to make them money but who’s going to take that chance?  If I were an agent or a publisher I don’t think I’d buy my novels.  The writings good, but not strong.  Why spend money publishing something that only a few people might buy?  Agents and publishers tell you they like to take chances on new writers but the odd are I won’t be one of them.   That’s not putting myself down, that’s an honest truth. 

It sounds like I’m giving up or I’m a pessimist.  Trust me, most people around me think I’m too optimistic about things.  I guess when you’re a realist about things that automatically makes it sound pessimistic.  I have hope that if I keep sending my stuff out someone will bite.  It will probably never happen but I have hope.   

I know my work and it’s good.  I like my work.  I read stuff that I’ve written years ago and I like it. I can see its flaws of course but I see flaws in most of the stuff I read.  Are my flaws any worst?   Maybe but until a professional reads my work I’ll never know.  Of course, the only way to get a pro to read my work is to get published.  Or pay a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of money so I’ll have to wait for a pro to buy my stuff.  Which probably won’t ever happen. 

When I spend an hour or so writing something I stop and wonder why I’m doing it.  Who am I writing for?  I want to write for people other than me and a handful of people who might listen to my podcasted writings at podiobooks.com.  The truth is, I’m not sure who I’m writing for anymore. In my 20’s and 30’s I wrote to try to get published.  I wrote to tell people I did something that was interesting.   I wrote because it was a release from a life that, while not horrible, had a bunch of holes that needed to be filled.  I wrote because my imagination was so large it needed an outlet.  I haven’t felt the need to fill any holes in my soul for a while. I wrote the Arwen saga because I had an idea that wouldn’t go away.  Now that that saga is done and I have nothing else to say I wonder why I still write. 

I’m working on another novel and my heart isn’t really in it. Could it be because the novel isn’t good enough to hold my interest or is it something more?  Have I finally gotten sick of spending the limited hours I have in the day writing something that no one will read?  Has my mind finally stopped supplying me with ideas?  Have I gotten to the point in my life where I don’t need to write anymore?  Or, do I simply need to sit back and relax and not worry about all those things?  

 

Almost science

I remember my first really bad comment on one of my stories. It was a story where I had the entire city of Chicago evacuating the city after a rather brutal alien invasion of the city. I had never really seen a mass evacuation, never really thought about the logistics behind millions of people walking down a highway toward a military base twenty miles away. I posted that chapter of a larger story on AOL's writing board and let people read and comment on it. I remember being pretty excited, I had posted a few short stories and they got some positive remarks so I was pretty confident that this epic tale would be no different. Heck, it had everything, a dynamic leader, some twists and turns, some heroism, everything I loved to read about and everything I love to write about. So, you can image my surprise when I get a very lengthy comment on the story ripping it apart line by line.

Thinking back on it now it actually wasn't that bad. The guy pretty much pointed out all the logical holes I had created, things that wouldn't be possible with so many people leaving the city. He asked good questions, how did they feed these people? How did they organize them? How did they all go to the bathroom, stuff that I really should have asked myself before writing the scene. But, at that time, 20 years or so ago when I wrote it, I was angry thinking that I didn't need to answer those kinds of questions, it was the story that was important, it was the heroes, that characters, the invasion, who cares what they ate or slept or peed. That wasn't the point!

Of course he was right, I need to ask myself questions before writing a technical scene like that. I need to figure out how to solve those kinds of problems and, since I write science fiction I can make magical solutions to the problems using science! Of course my science needs to be vaguely plausible and normally, I'm okay with that. A strange concept now could be common place in the future, I just need to nudge it in the direction of 'yeah, it could happen.'

I think I got pretty good at that. Wormholes can't open so I have to figure out a way to make it open. Okay, I saw a show on the Science Channel about Particle Accelerators and how they could accidently create Strangelets, an exotic particle that turns all other particles around it into a strangelet and could open a wormhole. Cool, that's prefect! So, I use it for my Arwen stories and it works well in the stories. Do I need to explain how we fit a particle accelerator into a starship when most of them today are miles and miles in circumference? Nah, I figured the people who are listening or reading can figure out that in 300 years we could probably scale it down to starship size so I didn't worry about that.

So, I think things through pretty well, for the most part, when I'm writing stories like this. Sometimes I'll think about it for weeks before even starting the story. I normally feel pretty confident sitting down that I can at least BS my way through the technical stuff until the second or third drafts but I can't cover everything and every time I post a story I worry if someone is going to send me an e-mail detailing why my science is wrong and why I should never write another science fiction story ever again.

I worry about that but it has never happened. When someone does comment on something I screwed up I take it in stride and move on. Heck, once it's out there it's really hard to bring it back so I just have to let the moment of stupidity hang there for everyone to see and read. And, to be honest, most of the time they're right and it forces me to think harder the next time I write a story in which a Dyson Sphere is 17 AU's in diameter. How will that affect, well, everything from its gravity signature to how close you need to be before you crash into it, how do the inhabitance live in it, stuff like that.

I love fantastic ideas and I love fantastic ideas in Science Fiction and, even if they don't make total sense when you really think about them, there really is a power to the imagination.

Creative choices

Writing is lonely. You need to write in a vacuum, you need to trust your own instincts and trust that what your brain is telling you is the right choice for your story. But, what if you're mind is trying to fool you into thinking that writing choice you've made is the correct one? Or, what if it is and someone else tells you something different and you go with that or, what if you just come up with some really bad ideas and there's no one around to tell you it's a bad idea or, they're all yes men who tell you your crap doesn't smell.

I think of this as I write, I also think of this as I watch movies or read books. I wonder why the writer made certain choices with the film or story. I will read or see something peculiar and think, "Why did they go that way?" or, "wasn't there someone in charge who told this person this was a horrible idea?"

The most recent example of this came from the movie The Watchmen. I really did love the movie, thought it was almost perfect except for maybe a few things. The one creative choice I couldn't understand was the use of music which seemed to distract from the scenes instead of enhancing them.

The scene that really sticks out in my mind was the first appearance of Doctor Manhattan during the Vietnam war. He was about fifty feet tall walking across a field killing all the enemies and, while they were showing this they were playing "Ride of the Valkyries" which, while a really cool song, didn't seem to fit the scene and I thought it was a bad song choice.

Another example from the movie was them playing "Purple Haze" when pulling back from the bad guy's lair (non-spoiler alert, not going to tell you who the bad guy is!) again, it seemed odd to me and just distracted from the scene. I wondered if anyone stopped for a moment to say, "maybe this isn't a good choice" or if they just went with it.

I think probably the biggest mistake ever made in a movie, book, or tv show, took place over the summer of 1999. We all waited in grand anticipation for the release of Star Wars: The Phantom menace. I could probably write an entire entry on bad choices that were made during the second trilogy but I think I'll just focus on the one that most people agree was simply a bad, bad idea. Midi-chlorians. (Bet you thought I was going to say Jar Jar Binks, didn't you?) I mean. . .what the heck was George Lucas thinking!? At what point did he wake up and say, "Hey, you know, this whole Force thing needs to be explained on a biological level." Maybe it was just the creator over thinking something. Maybe it was something that had bothered him for years, the inability to explain the force, and he needed to do that to clear his own mind, or maybe it was just a really horrible idea. Whatever the case I wished someone had just stopped him and said, "George, you can't explain the force, it's just there and people have accepted that so why can't you?" But, no one did (or they did and he ignored them.) and there you go, we now have Midi-chlorians in the Star Wars universe.

I sometimes wish I had a staff of twenty to tell me if I had a bad idea or not but I don't, I need to judge for myself if an idea I had is bad or not and I always struggle with trying to filter them out in my own writing. I don't want someone to read or listen to my work and say, "well, that's just stupid." Unless I've said it to myself a few dozen times. I can think of a more than one example of my own writing where I knew the idea was kind of out there but went with it anyway for either dramatic reasons or I just couldn't think of anything better or, in a few cases, because I just thought it was a neat idea.

In my novel Ida I had the main character hitch a ride on a comet as it made its way around the sun. I did this by having him and his crew construct a giant net which would wrap itself around the comet, his life pod would be attached to the end of the net and when the comet was caught it would carry him along for the ride. When I came up with the idea I knew it was kind of silly but I decided to see if I could pull it off. I did a lot of research and found that you know, it's not impossible so I did it. The creative reason for it was to get the hero away from the Space Station while all hell broke loose so he could return to become an even greater hero. I do sometimes wonder if I made the right choice there because a re-write would take an awful long time to complete.

In the Arwen Season III: Armada I wrote a scene that still sort of bothers me today. In it the Earth is about ready to be attacked by a large alien force. The Earth fleet was decimated in an early war and they needed the perfect plan to defeat the bad guys. In the story I had Vice Admiral Cook in charge of the defense of the Earth, he and he alone came up with the brilliant plan to save the planet. I knew, even as I writing it, that this was impossible. There would be no way that one man would be in charge of coming up with a plan to save a planet, it would be a committee of highly trained officers and they would spend weeks coming up with the perfect defense but, I didn't have the time nor did I feel like writing page after page of Generals, Admiral, Presidents, and anyone else who needed to be in the room talking about the best way to defend the planet. Not only would that have bored me to tears the reader and listener would have zoned out after a while wondering when the action was going to take place. So, I made a creative choose to have one man come up with the plan knowing someone might say something about it. So far this seems to bother no one other than me.

Right now I'm struggling with a choice I made in the sixth Arwen story. I'm dealing with a thinking computer and I can't decide if it's going to be completely sentient or not. The problem is the sentient computer who is trying to figure out how to act human is so old and has been done so many times I can't add anything new to it but, it's still a pretty cool idea that I'd like to explore in my own writing. I've decided that's the path I'm going down, that the computer is trying to figure out what it's like to be human, it'll make mistakes, it'll act on instinct, and in the climax it'll do something that it thinks is the right choice but in the end it could kill everyone. That's what I'm going with now but the more I think about it the more I wonder if it's a good idea. Again, wish I had a team of 20 to help me with this decision but, as it is, it's something I need to decide for myself.

Well, it's ready!

Sometimes getting the first part of a project done is more than enough to make sure you get the entire project completed.  I've had a few starts and stops with some of my Podiobooks projects, most of them because I just didn't like it, others because I was simply lazy but, I've been working on the fourth Arwen story for a long time now and I finally got Chapter one recorded, edited with all the music added.  All I need to do now is simply convert it to the proper MP3 format and it'll be set.  Podoibooks.com has a 5 chapter limit to start so I need to get at least 4 more finished before uploading it.  I've got chapter one finished and I promise I'll finish the entire project before the year is out.

Heck, I might even revisit my only other, none Arwen project sometime in the future! We'll have to see how tired of Podiobooking I am when I'm finished with the Arwen.