In particular, I like this one:

If you’ve been sitting on an idea until you think you’re good enough to do it justice, do it now! You may be run over by a bus tomorrow. Even if you aren’t, by the time you think you’re good enough, the passion for it will be gone. Write it now! Write all your good ideas as quickly as you can after you get them. Don’t worry about getting more; they’ll come faster and faster the more you write. Before you know it, you’ll be begging people to take them, like a gardener with zucchini.

S/he’s got that right about the zucchini!

But agreeing with this intellectually and actually doing it are two different things.

‘Don’t think’ can’t be overemphasized. I tend to think too much. Like many geeks, I like thinking, and I’m probably a bit conceited about the whole thing. Trivia is fun! Puzzles are funner! Knowing more than the other guy is the best high in the world.

But I needed to not think to write. I’ve heard it before, about not listening to your inner critic, your inner editor. But I hadn’t been worried about spelling and grammar and syntax. I already knew not to anguish over any of that in the first draft. Heck, I don’t really anguish over it in general. I know my grammar could be better and I know my words aren’t naturally full of metaphors and music, but I write competently technically.

But it’s more than that. I was worrying too much about plot. Characters I get. Characters are easy. I’ve been doing characters on MUSHes for years. Years and years. I was hung up on the idea that any science fiction or fantasy story needed to revolve around a science fictional or fantastic element. I was trying to find cool ideas to write stories about and a plot and form and format to go with them.

In short, I was THINKING.

So. Stop that. Stop it right now.

I need to trust that most stories are going to be science fiction or fantasy, because that’s what I’ve always read and that’s part of who I am. If a few creep out that aren’t either, that’s okay.

I can still base a story around a general idea. The Beauty and the Beast one (which I just now realized doesn’t have a name!!! It never even occurred to me before that it was untitled) has a general idea at its heart. Fairy tale + shounen ai. I can still be commercial in that way. If there’s a call for a specific type of story, I can think about it, write my words, and go.

At least, I hope. I’ve read before that the well doesn’t run dry and not to worry about lightening only striking once. But I’m a worrier.

I could try to write another now, but I’d better not. For practical reasons. It’d be another three hours of writing and would leave me tired, hungry, and stiff. Not a good state to be in with that graduate paper to write.

It can be the cake to go with the pizza I’m going to order when the paper’s done.

So I turned to the library, seeking some sort of inspiration. Some book that would tell me how to come up with nonfiction ideas that would be interesting to do, suit me, and would sell. Or maybe just some book that would hint at how to make a living writing nonfiction, in a way that I could appreciate and enjoy. Well, whatever.. so I browsed the library database and plucked out all the writing books that sounded interesting and useful.

Which is how I happened upon Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. I like Ray Bradbury’s stuff. From what I can remember of it. He’s from my junior high and high school science fiction reading period. And I watched that show that dramatized his short stories.

I read the first couple of essays and it was like.. wow. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been missing. My attempts to explain what he said that I needed to hear and grokked will probably fall flat. But I’ll give it a go. Regardless of how well or badly I do at explaining it, you need to read this book. Or find the essays somewhere else.

The Preface. I guess you’re not likely to find that anywhere, but the Preface was useful!

“The Joy of Writing”

“Run Fast, Stand Still, or, the Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts From Old Minds”

Or, failing to find some of those, you can read the essay that was at the end, “Zen in the Art of Writing”. But the first three are the most important. That last one just reinforced what I’d gleaned from the others.

The Preface told me that you have to write to be well. And it’s right. The natural high of writing should help any depression. So if you take writing as a good substitute for therapy or a pill, then it works. It’s cheaper than either and the only side effect is you’ve created something. Which may later even make you money. I think if I could and would write regularly, it would help me mentally.

“The Joy of Writing” told me to enjoy writing. That does not sound like a revelation. You need to hear Bradbury say it and explain it. To not only enjoy it, but to have fun. To have a LOT of fun. Get it all out in one spurt and think about it later.

“Run Fast, Stand Still…” described his process. He’d write down words and phrases and later go back to see what was there. Which is how he got at the heart of what he needed to tell. Got the subconscious to speak to him.

“Zen in the Art of Writing” simply emphasized and gave name to what “The Joy of Writing” said. DON’T THINK. By the time I’d gotten to this essay, I’d already learned that lesson.

So this is how I synthesized the first few essays into practical usage.

I put the book down. I opened TextPad. I closed my eyes. And I typed. I thought about the requirements for the Iris Print fairy tale anthology. This gave a bit of form to my typing. I typed words and phrases that came to mind. Anything that came to mind, though I tried to stick to nouns. Some I’d be hard-pressed to figure out how they were related to fairy tales at all.

When I petered out there, I thought about shounen ai and came up with another string of words and phrases.

Then I tried to get a character to speak to me. Some of it was still just words and phrases, but it was a start.

And somehow it transitioned into a new TextPad file and the start of a story. And the middle. And the end. Based on Beauty and the Beast, if you’d care to know. Why that when my first thoughts of fairy tale was the Wolf? Go figure.

Roughly 4800 words. Four times the length of my only completed and submitted story. Written in 3 hours, give or take.

I should’ve been sleeping. Or I should’ve been writing my final graduate paper. But it did make for a great start to a day I then mostly spent sleeping. And now here I am writing about it instead of doing that final graduate paper due later tonight.

I finished the book now. It can go back to the library. You can check it out next if you like!

I really can’t expect it before next week. With the flood of chick manuscripts earlier, WorldCon, and Labor Day weekend, I’m probably in for a longer wait than usual for F&SF. Still, should get it this month sometime. If it’s into next month, I’ll start getting my hopes up. That wouldn’t be good.

I wore out K’s patience at the post office, what with weighing the envelope and the envelope with the other envelope in it and then feeding like a dozen bills into the machine to buy 2 books of stamps. It cost 63 cents for the return envelope and 87 cents to send the whole thing. That’s a total of 1.50. Next time I’ll just use a business envelope for the reply, but for the first one, I sort of wanted to see the whole thing go out and back. Maybe it’ll be worth money someday! Maybe the 1.50 it cost to send the whole thing.

So.. now I wait.

Anyway, because there aren’t as many women being published as men in sf/f magazines, some people are trying to organize a flood day. On August 18th, a bunch of women are going to mail off submissions to F&SF magazine. Chicks must do things in groups. So after reading about it here it seems like a good idea to you, go for it.

Anyway, her blog pointed me to DeepGenre. It’s a blog with contributions from several writers, some of whom I’ve actually heard of. It’s interesting if you’re interested in reading about genres and publishing and writing and all that sort of thing.

The main character, a Rip Van Winkle type born in the late 1800′s, goes to the library and is taught how to do searches on the Internet. He uses Google and it calls up quite a lot of information about this woman he’s looking for. A woman of some note, but I wouldn’t say of a lot of note. The term used is ‘minor celebrity’. Fairly minor, I’d say.

Now, Google did exist in this time frame. It recently came out of beta. However, it wasn’t as common as it is today and it wasn’t as chock-full of pages for searches to hit. I remember using Google back before it was used by everybody. Back when it was cool and used by geeks. It’s possible it showed up on a list of search engines at a library in late 1999, but I think it would be fairly far down the list. Surely Yahoo was still the big player then? And several others I can barely remember, some of them still around.

I think maybe the author was just enamored of showing us this man-out-of-time’s view of our ‘modern’ inventions and wanted to make an amusing comment about Google.

Lesson about writing: Research. Especially research geeky topics if you’re writing science fiction and fantasy, because your readers (mostly geeks) are going to call you out. And don’t assume that Google, cell phones, iPods, and Playstations (Rowling, talking to you), have been around longer than they have.