www.andrewmackay.net:

Seriously, why, right? (Hehe… get it… why write, why right?) What motivates people to write? It seems to be the pursuit of a number of things: a pursuit of communication, a pursuit of art, a pursuit of drama, a pursuit of the tale.

For me, I think it’s been a desire to pursue effectively communicating through art and a desire to tell a story that I like. I feel like I have to be careful with what I mean by effectively communicating through art: I’m certainly not implying that I’m going to sneak something to the readers through the guise of art.

Rather, I feel like art naturally communicates — whether its the value of friendship and honor in the Lord of the Rings, the concept of sacrifice in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the intertwining destinies of the Wheel of Time, these are themes that the reader percieves in the art the author has created.

That’s what I’m seeking to do: to tell great stories that reflect true themes, themes like friendship, honor, and the value of learning.

But, it’d all be impossible if I didn’t like the story. I feel like it’s worth telling. It makes a difference. During a few off months, I’m quick to admit that it was a lack of love for the story that caused me to not forge ahead. But having come back around, every night when I open the files that I’m writing in, I get a little excited about what I’m going to write. That’s a great feeling. I can truly say that it is its own reward. Who knew?

Mondays are always tough. You roll out of bed, not at all ready for what is to come. If you’re like me, you grab a cup of coffee; then another. You go through the motions of a morning routine, all of it rushing headlong into a day at work. Once you’re there, you attack the pile of things that you know must be done before Friday ends. Eight hours pass. You go home, content that another Monday is done.

All that negativity brings me around to what I hope to accomplish this morning. My intention is to self-medicate. Since there are no hard drugs around, I figured that a little reminder of something good would be a great way to start my morning:

My wife is the best wife a man could have. You could say that all this writing stuff is almost the equivalent of a very early mid-life crisis. My priorities have changed. I’m spending a significant portion of every day on writing and blogging and developing those abilities.

It is not without a cost for both me and my family. Even as I endeavour to do it after the rest of the family goes to bed, I can see it start to creep into other time slots.

My wife has always been supportive of whatever I’m “on about.” If she thinks I’m crazy, she’s done a fantastic job of not letting me in on it. She supports me, encourages me, and generally makes me feel like I’m better than I actually am. Wait. Rewrite: she genuinely makes me better than I actually am. She makes space for me to do things I think are important. She gets on board and makes them important to her, too.

So, this Monday morning, as I dive into cup number 3 and 4 (and 5 if there’s still any in the coffee pot,) I’m going to stop and remind myself of just how blessed a guy I am.

Rebecca, thank you. I love you.

The rest of you, have a good Monday.

On Saturdays, I’m aiming for a bit of a change of pace. Something not writing/art related, something that I’m interested in, something that I feel like I might be able to explain.

So today, this is hockey:

Hockey is basically this: two nets on either end of an ice surface that is 200 feet long and 85 feet wide. A guy in a ridiculously large amount of padding in front of each net. 10 guys in less padding (though still a lot), five on each team, who attempt to put a little, round, black, rubber disc, three inches in diameter, into each others’ net. (Hence the padding on the guy standing in front. He’s called a goalie, just like in soccer.) All of this while balancing on skates.

It is beautiful. Seriously. It is an incredibly fast game with tons of momentum and plenty of momentum shifts. It’s intricate — there are set plays that make the best diagrammed football play look like chump change. There’s improvisation in spades, thanks to the difficult nature of controlling a piece of hard rubber on a sheet of ice. There are times when, thanks to the bounce of the puck, two forwards (the term used for players who typically play on the offense side of the puck) get alone with the other team’s goalie. The goalie sometimes wins, even.

People are drawn to hockey for many different reasons — some like the fighting, some like the checking, some like the atmosphere. As for me, I like the speed and grace that a good game of hockey brings to the fore. There’s nothing quite like watching Sidney Crosby or Mario Lemieux confuse defencemen, sneak by them with the puck, deke the goalie out of his shorts, and put the puck soundly in the back of the net. When you see that siren light up at the end of a seemingly impossible play… there’s just nothing quite like it.

This is hockey.

The Take a Listen posts will be another regular series that I hope you’ll read around here. Hopefully it will catalogue some things that are obscure, some that are popular, some that annoy you, and maybe even some that annoy me.

Jakob Dylan’s voice is imprinted in my head along with some very distinct songs from my teenage years. Most of those came from the album Bringing Down the Horse by the Wallflowers. Songs like The Difference and One Headlight are so catchy that right now, if a drummer appeared in my family room and started tapping out that distinctive beat from One Headlight, I could probably pick up my guitar and figure out at the very least the bass line to it. And sing along. Not at all as well as Jakob Dylan, but perhaps in line with his dad’s vocals.

So, anyway, when I heard that Jakob Dylan had a “solo” album out, I thought self, that’s worth a shot. My wife and I first listened to Seeing Things on the hour-long drive over a ridiculously windy mountain to her parents’ house. It was the perfect companion. I cannot express how quickly we were caught up in the music. It’s just downright good. A very moody album, varied musically (much folky-er than his work with The Wallflowers), it’s just plain dynamite.

So, here’s my endorsement: go check out Jakob Dylan. Punch his name in at Pandora.com and you’ll get a great playlist, plus you’ll probably get to hear some songs off of the album. If you’re as hooked as I am, you’ll be a buyer.

I very recently started on a crusade to complete my first book. It had been essentially left to rot at the 16,000 word mark for about a year. Yep, no progress, a year. It seems like a long time, mostly because it was.

So, all of the sudden, I started writing again. There were several different factors, but a big reason was a podcast my little brother had referred me to last summer. It’s called Writing Excuses.

Writing Excuses is a podcast put together by three writers, Brandon Sanderson (Fantasy author of Elantris, the Mistborn Series, also “the guy who gets to finish the Wheel of Time series”), Howard Tayler (writer and artist responsible for Schlock Mercenary), and Dan Wells (Horror author of I Am Not a Serial Killer). In it, they cover all kinds of topics that pertain to writing. It’s smart, funny, and it’s consistently 15 minutes long.

I’ll point you to Season One, episode 17 : it’s the one that helped me to jump start myself back down the path to finishing my story. Of course, if you dig into their archives, you’ll find episode three, Killing Your Darlings. It has me absolutely convinced that I’ll finish this first story and then have to throw it away.

But, I look at it this way: if it’s accurate, I’ll be prepared for it.

A very worthwhile resource if you’re interested in writing or in thinking more about what exactly you’re reading.

From time to time, you’ll see a post that starts with WIR. That simply stands for “What I’m Reading.” As a writer, I find one of the best ways to stimulate my brain is by reading widely. These posts will be an opportunity for thoughts on content, style, and method. It’s way more for me than for you, but I’ve got to have something to put up here, right?

In the interest of full disclosure, at the time I’m writing this, I’ve read the first three books of The Spiderwick Chronicles. The final two books are in the house, waiting for me.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a clever little series of books that tell one story in five parts. They are very definitely aimed at younger readers — Amazon.com notes that the target audience is ages 9-12. What is a grown man doing reading books intended for 9-12 year olds? What a great question.

First of all, I’m trying to establish exactly what the young adult (YA) audience is reading now and whether or not I should aim for that audience.

Secondly, and more importantly, a frequent discussion around the Mackay household revolves around at what age The Lord of the Rings will become appropriate for our child. He’s only thirteen months old, so I guess we have a while to figure it out. However, it raises a lot of questions for both my wife and me. We were both heavily impacted by a love for reading in our childhood. We also both read books that were probably over our heads at times.

Realizing that each child is different, and that our little guy may not even like reading (what will we do then? Put him in sports? ), nevertheless, we have broad discussions of themes that are “too old for a ten-year-old” and things that are appropriate.

This brings me back to Spiderwick. This little set of novels feels very much like an introduction to the Fantasy Genre. Magical creatures, strange sounds in the walls, “more than meets the eye” in a non-transformers sort of way, the hallmarks of the genre are all here. What’s so intriguing about it for me is that the authors do it in a very non-sinister way. I haven’t yet got the feeling that the authors were out to give their intended audience nightmares.

They’re quick reads too. There are certainly some themes present that a parent would want to talk to their children about (divorce, the way the Grace siblings handle their parents’ divorce, fighting at school, siblings fighting, parents not believing their children, etc.) but what strikes me even as I tick those off in my head is that they are very human themes. The goblins and faeries and sprites and trolls all seem to be presented in an age appropriate way.

Just thinking these things through has been helpful for me as I try to establish both the audience I’d like to write for and the ability to write to that audience without talking down to them or flying over their heads.

Bottom line, like anything else, if you’re a parent looking for something for your children to read, read ahead of them. But, give the first book in The Spiderwick Chronicles a glance. It shouldn’t take you long to get through it.

Get it? Habits? Hehe. You can laugh.

So, writing habits. I have a history of being a spotty writer. 5,000 words one week, nothing for three weeks after that. I’m learning that if I can make myself establish a consistent effort in my writing, I’m a lot more likely to make significant progress on my work. This runs contrary to the romantic theory I’d tried. That theory says that you just “wait for inspiration to strike,” and the whole book pours out at once. I mean, I guess it could happen that way for some people, but can you imagine? I’d feel especially bad for the people who write 200k + words per book. Think of how that’d go for Robert Jordan’s later Wheel of Time books!

I made the conservative estimate the other day that if I had waited for inspiration to strike, I might be 8000 words into the book I’m trying to write. A start to the story, perhaps, but roughly 1/4 of what I’ve written using a “write daily” approach.

So, I did some research. I used the king of all resources, Google. I found some interesting (if true) facts. (A lot of these came from this article at authormagazine.org.) Like, Hemingway, apparently, aimed for five hundred words a day.

/begin narcissistic detour/ That’s actually the goal I’ve set for myself as well. There are days where I double and triple that, but I try not to go to bed without getting at least 500 words on paper. /end narcissism/

Jack London, on the other hand, wrote between 1,000 and 1,500 words a day. Here’s my favorite: Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings over 11 years. That’s approximately 245 words a day, if you average it out.

Of course, there’s no way that my 500 words are as creative and well thought out as Tolkien’s 245. I also don’t have the massive amount of research and world creation that he had. But, it’s still neat to think that the raw production of it was accomplished by a sustained effort over a fairly long period of time.

I’m convinced, too, that it will be a sustained effort that actually converts me from a writer into a published author. It may not be my first book or even my fifteenth book, but if I keep at it and learn with each one, I think the rest will come.

So, this is a topic I expect to come back to, but for now, that’s writing habits.

So, this is a beginning. I felt a little bit like Robert Jordan there. The wheel turns? I digress.

This will be a place to track what I’m reading, what I’m writing, and what I’m finding interesting at any given moment. In addition to that, it’s going to be an exercise in continuity and persistence. As I develop writing as a habit instead of a whim, this space will help me to channel my efforts.

And, we’ve come full circle to Robert Jordan.

Get it? Channelling?

It’s funny.

Come on.