Research vs Making It Up!  
    
    I've been hard bashing writing rules recently, and this post concerns another one that I have a hard time reconciling to the way I actually write.

    The rule is: "Write What You Know."

    I have to call bullshit on that one too.

    I really don't believe that any author writes what they know 100 percent of the damn time. If we did, we'd never utter the words "I need to research this" with glazed-over eyes and orgasming brain cells. We writers dig writing about shit we don't know because it gives us an excuse to do one of our favorite activities (besides writing and drinking coffee). READING!

    And researching something for a story or novel is a great way to get some reading time in. Not that research is always fun. But it is necessary.

    I think the "write what you know" rule just means to stick to those topics you are familiar with, because even if you have to research parts of it, you will have already begun your writing project from a place of familiarity, and therefore, comfort. Indeed, I have my doubts that writers, fiction writers anyway, ever really write about things they are not at least a little familiar with and that interest them.

    I don't know anything about black holes, or much of the science about them, either (except for having read Stephen Hawkings book A Brief History of Time) but I may write about them someday. I will gather research on it and learn the basics of the science (research is important)and write something. Maybe I'll break a few rules along the way. It's fiction, after all. The point is that it should be okay for an author to write whatever the hell they want to, no holds barred, research or not. Write for the pure enjoyment of it, for the exercise! Now, if you write a story about black holes and get absolutely everything about the science wrong, you may not be able to get it published. And if you do, expect some grumbling from hard sci-fi enthusiasts. But if you want to write a story about a planet of giant chickens nestled in the core of a black hole, you should write that story. Hell, I may write that story for the pure fun of it.

    Remember the heyday of science fiction in the 40s and 50s? Some of the best stories I've read from that period were the ones where the writers just made the science and everything up. Pure creativity...just add weird impossible planets and bizarre scary impossible alien monsters. Those stories were a joy to read. They were fun!
  
    And in the end that's what all stories should be.

    Fun.
    
    
PS: This is an article I found but never had time to read before writing this post. It's a Publisher's Weekly article written by Andy Weir about doing research as a writer and writing about a topic he didn't know a lot about, namely the planet Mars. He talks about how research could only fill some of the gaps, and in the end he had to rely on "speculation" about how he thought a new energy for powering spaceships would evolve in the future. He made it up, but in a plausible way. That's great science fiction creative imagination at work.    

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/61328-how-to-research-like-a-writer.html
   

    It has been a problem that has plagued me from the moment I decided to take up writing again and to work toward making a name for myself about twenty years ago. I have always written, since the time I first picked up a pen as a child and scribbled in the family Bible (that was probably the foreshadow of my inner editor). 
    I have had nasty long intervals of not writing, though. Years, sometimes. Some of the most miserable times in my life. I was young, but I was working myself to the bone and often too tired when I got home from working 10-11 hour shifts at a job where people screamed at me over the phone about what a nasty bitch I was to even consider sitting down and writing when I got home. I didn't want to listen to anyone when I got home, not even my Muse. Even the weekends, I just wanted to feel the unfamiliar rhythm of having nothing to do, no boss breathing down the neck, no quota to make. The rare rhythm of having no rhythm. 
    I just scribbled in those days; bits of poetry, bits of stories. I was always planning to write, but finding that time and exhaustion and other people put demands on me that kept me from doing anything significant. I had no voice of my own, and no time to find one. But nothing ever got finished. I still have a rough time finishing some of my stories, but I keep plugging away on my back-burner stuff, the ones that I feel I still have a thread of a story connected to my soul. 
    After I got laid off in 2010 from the shittiest, most corrupt company I ever worked for (they are no longer in business), I decided to do two things: go back to college to pursue my English degree and to start writing stories again. I did both. By 2015, I had both my BA in English Lit and several poems and stories published. 
    Still, my writing and publication success was erratic and I remain, even today, mostly unknown. I am in a state of strange cognitive dissonance, both unhappy and not too disappointed at the same time (sort of in a Schroedinger's box of ambivalence) about my career thus far. But all that is for another day, another post. I am gaining more success. I "almost" made it into an anthology recently with some women who are quite well known in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Almost meaning final round. I'm saving that story to submit to a higher tier magazine soon. Plus, I have seen the darker side of becoming well-known. I have writer friends on Facebook who are stalked and harassed because of who they are outside of writing. And I consider myself way more radical. Plus, I just came out, so that is scary enough in today's climate. But again, another day for that particular rant. I'm getting off on a tangent here.  
    One of the modern writing abilities I have not been able to master well at all is blogging. I am so bad at it that I research things to write about, try writing about them, and end up frustrated that my blog post doesn't seem as sophisticated and cool as some of the other writers out there. The perfectionist in me takes over. Or I find a type-o a week after I've posted something and agonize over it for a month about how many people might have seen it.
    Granted, the more accomplished writers I follow on social media have probably been blogging (and writing) for a lot longer than I have, but still. I shudder thinking how many unpublished posts I left sitting on my now defunct Wordpress blog. There are over twenty now on my Weebly site. I am so unconfident in my writing about non-fictional life stuff that I make a grand resolution on January 1st every year that I am going to get better at it. I'll put up a post or two and high-five myself, but then that's the end of it. I get caught up in life or whatever. Not trying to make excuses for my lack of self-discipline but I have been Vitamin D and Vitamin B deficient, and goddess knows, at my age, probably iron deficient as well. I'm monstrously tired. A lot. But that's all getting better gradually, with massive doses of D and B. There's also the self-confidence thing. It's the main reason I give up, both in story writing and in blog writing. I am done giving up. 
    Over the past year, one of the things I've been doing is more story and poetry writing but also more reading and studying of the non-fiction writing of other authors, via their blogs or books of essays. Hey, I'm thinking, I was good at writing essays in college, perhaps if I approach it from the angle of just writing an essay about whatever strikes me at the moment, then I might have a shot at getting more blog writing done. One of my favorite fiction authors is Ursula K. LeGuin. And recently I've come upon her books of essays like discovering a marble-sized pearl in an oyster. It was while reading the introduction to one of her last book of essays (perhaps it was her last) before she passed away, No Time to Spare, she floored me when she confessed she was not that great at writing for a blog either, though for a different reason than myself. For her, introversion...though perhaps that plays some little part for me as well. I'm just afraid of looking stupid. 
    Ursula's essays read just as the rest of her writing does, beautifully. And although I am certain to never achieve the level of wordsmithing that this woman accomplished in her astounding life, she has again inspired me to write...this time non-fiction. I am not going to push myself to some great heights or goals I will not be able to obtain with blogging. I'm just going to try to write more about the little life things, and writing things that appeal to me, while focusing the greater part of my energies to writing stories and eventually a damn novel. I will focus on trying to write essays about life and love and the stars in the skies. I'm going to write on the fly and edit a bit closer, yes, but I will not obsess over little errors not caught in the process. There's no such thing as perfection in our world. 
    So...right, I'm gonna write. 

What the Hell is a Beginning, Anyway?
    
When it comes to writing flash fiction, there are rules. Apparently.

I've read many articles by flash fiction writers about how to write the genre of short fiction (flash fiction is usually considered to be a story of less than 1000 words) and I've written and published some flash myself. Maybe it seems arrogant or foolhardy, or perhaps I was just naive at the time, but I did not read articles on how to write flash until I was already writing it—and getting it published. I just sort of happened to start writing it as part of an online community of flash fiction writers I got involved with on Twitter. Friday Flash writers posted links to their stories on Twitter with the hashtag #FridayFlash. I read a few stories and then dug into writing my own. I've been writing them for awhile now, even though I no longer have time to post them to blogs (note that if you want to publish an original story somewhere, most magazines consider something you have published to your blog or website as previously published and they will either not accept it, or pay you a lower reprint rate). 
 
I only recently decided to read some articles in order to post them to a writing group page I run on Facebook geared toward setting certain months of the year aside to write short stories (sort of like November is set aside for writers to write novels during National Novel Writing Month, ie. NaNoWriMo). ShoStoWriMo is a group of about forty short story writers on Facebook who try, from time to time, to set aside a month where we will write short stories all month long. No rules, just write. You can write a story a day (if you're superhuman), or a story a week, or write one story for the whole month. No worries if you don't finish or your story turns into something longer. The goal is to write. Short stories and flash are the focus, but as we writers all know, sometimes the seeds grow into towering oaks instead of bushes. But the deal is we begin with short story or flash ideas and plots. 
    
So I have been scrounging the interwebz for cool and informative articles, YouTube videos, and TEDTalks about writing. Writing in general, but mostly writing short--short stories and flash. Flash can further be categorized into really really short forms such as drabbles (100 word stories) and micro-fiction (stories from 1-to-500 or 750 words). I've found some really good articles and have been myself reading them for information and to see whether or not they are good enough to post to the group. 

There are dozens out there that give "rules" for writing short stories and flash fiction. Personally, I'm a fan of the W. Somerset Maugham quote that "there are three rules for writing but nobody knows what they are". He was speaking of novels, I believe, but the same can be said for short stories and flash. But if you comb through the articles out there you will find more geared toward "rules" for writing them than sand grains on Miami Beach. Other writers have twisted the words of Picasso to say say that you need to know the rules of your profession (writing) before you can break them, though, I think the famous authors were referring to grammar and punctuation rules rather than form and substance (or art). Most of the articles I've found on rules about flash tend to focus on form and substance. And those rules can go straight to hell in a cookie tin, as far as I am concerned! To tell the story that your guts demand, that your characters COMMAND you to tell, sometimes you have to say "fuck you" to the rules. 

One of those rules that I trash frequently when writing flash stories (at first because I didn't know the rule, and then now because I want to) is that you can't begin your story at "the beginning." You need to start it in the middle. Or even at the end. I can understand the whole "start in the middle" idea. It's a flash or a short story so there isn't a lot of room for plot devices and character arcs as you'd expect in longer works of fiction. I've never quite mastered telling a flash or short beginning with the ending, however. And not beginning at the beginning? I don't understand what that means, really. I mean, you can take any story really, and start it somewhere, but when you read about the characters and plot you realize that even beginnings are not the "actual" beginnings. There must have been events that happened even before the first words of any story. So, beginning at the very beginning just doesn't happen, at least that I have seen in short fiction. I am placing a challenge upon myself to try and write a short story from the very beginning at some point in my career. (The egg cracked and the World walked out...something like that). I believe it may be possible to write a short work from the absolute beginning. And should you? My stories always begin however the first sentence forms in my brain. I may change it later on, but that is how I write. 

Should a writer never begin a story at the very beginning? I say, "No." Begin your story wherever you feel it needs to begin: the dragon taking her first flight or breathing her first fiery fumes, taking her last breath to pass on wisdom to a younger generation, or from the first view of her world as she steps forth from the cracked egg. (There I go cracking eggs again!) I believe the only bad way to tell a story is not telling it at all. 

Whenever the story begins in the writer's head... That's the best time for the tale to start. 

    Awhile back, I entertained some crazy ideas. One idea was about how to get more writing time and how I could go about getting ready to tackle starting to work seriously writing something every day, or nearly every day, especially how to get back to working on my novel The Strange Blue Days of Dr. Fountainbrew. The other insane brain fart has to do with the fact that I've been really bummed about not getting back to college and getting my MFA. I realize I don't need an MFA to write or get published, since I wrote stories and got published well before I got my BA degree. My girlfriend calls my desire for the MFA my geas. It tugs at me, but what with my working more hours at my public media job and my second job as a book editor, I simply do not have time to tackle coursework for a creative writing program at the moment. 
    So, I've come up with some compromises. I've decided that since New Year's resolutions don't tend to work out well for me (well, do they for anyone?) that I want to make some resolutions for my birthday, which is this coming Wednesday (July 3rd). 
    I will make a plan to devote many more hours per week to writing, and still keep on track with my editing projects. I will need to set aside time, and plan for that time. Arrange to have myself some extra time away from the things that distract me (Facebook, anime, etc.)in order to practice the fundamentals that help one be a better writer. And the first thing that I need to learn to get better at is being more disciplined. If I don't start making myself write more every chance I get, I may as well give up, and there is no way in hell I'm gonna do that. I've already set this plan into motion, writing whenever I can get some time. In the morning before editing. On my lunch break at work. Whenever I can open my WIP folder in my Google Docs and have a moment to myself. I write. Another plan for to get more writing done is what you're reading here: blogging. I'm terrible at it, I don't mind confessing. I read the blogs of other writers and think "How the hell can they do it?" I can't think of things to blog about or when I try to write a piece for my blog, it comes out sounding awkward and stupid. But I also realize the only thing that can fix that is practice and time. So, this blog that I have not touched, in several months of Sundays, is going to get active again. 
    I've begun watching James Scott Bell's fiction writing course on The Great Courses and during just the first lecture I have realized some of the things I've been doing have me hitting roadblocks in my writing, as far as being more disciplined. Many writers, for instance, keep "daily" writing progress spreadsheets. With my current financial situation of needing to work two jobs to support myself, I just can't do this. I can't even manage to write everyday, so after several days of not being able to write, I get so depressed I can't even think of updating a spreadsheet with the number "0" in a daily word count column. When Bell suggested in his lecture keeping a weekly word count progress sheet, I was floored. He said to make a goal of how many words you wanted to write that week and keep track of it that way. NOW THAT sounds like something that would be doable. Of course, it would mean I still need to keep track of how many words I write per day on the days that I write but to have the main progress spreadsheet be in a weekly format would take a huge amount of pressure off of me. 
    As for me missing out on the coursework and feedback of an MFA program, I've decided to take up self study again, but this time around, I hope to be able to section off even more of my busy schedule to do readings from some selected books I have on the shelf and doing the exercises that I can. I hope sometime, I can convince some of my online friends to join me and put together a creative writing self-study program. If any of my friends who are reading this are interested, please message me on Facebook or email me. I'd be glad to hash out what we could do to get our creative juices flowing in a successful direction. 
     At a later time, I'll share some of the tools I'm using to reach my lofty goals. 
     This post is 811 words. Not a bad start. 

A while ago I decided to create a new blog on Wordpress that would serve as a place to post my multimodal (mini-stories, prose, or poems combined with images) work. I'm happy to say that I've been working on the site and I'm ready to launch it, coinciding with February 2019's Post-It-Note Poetry Challenge. 

The blog is called "little paper parasols" and it signifies my love of short oriental poetry (haiku, tanka, renku) and other short-form types (cinquian, sonnets, freeform, couplets, and my own invention, the octain). I'm calling this site an e-chapbook because goodness knows when I'll have time or energy to create an actual chapbook or format one for submission to a small poetry press. Plus here, I can combine my differing tastes of literary, speculative, and the absurd with no worries. The poems posted there are what they are. They could talk about birds, or robots, or the angst and yearning of long-distance love. 

Read "little paper parasols" here: little paper parasols

My challenge for Post-It Note poetry in 2019 will be to write and post one poem each weekday. Weekends are full of writing and editing work so I am ruling them out this year. 

​

Michael Chabon's blurb on the front cover sums up this story collection well:

"A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story."

Dark wonders, surreal and often terrifyingly handsome; beautifully quirky and so damn fun. This was my "bathroom book" for many months, but I can't recommend it as a bathroom book.The reason is that there are some long stories in here. But they ALL worth reading. 

I recommend it for the bus or train, or for curling up on the sofa, or as a before bedtime read. 

Here is a list of my favorite stories from the book:

• ​A Hard Truth About Waste Management, by Sumanth Prabhaker
  • ​Flushing your trash down the toilet will piss off whatever lives there. Bad idea. 
• The Whipping, by Julia Elliot
  • Weird parents, weirder children, and mutant neighbors. A strange girl awaiting punishment narrates this oddity.
• A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian
  • Hauntingly beautiful. 
• Draco Compestris, by Sarah Monette
  • Because dragon skeletons and strange children nobody sees (or maybe they just don't want to). 
• The Chinese Boy, by Ann Stapleton
  • A Rear Window type story with a paralyzed man and his daughter who witness a bank teller's descent to attempted suicide, a shared madness of all three. 
• First Kisses from Beyond the Grave, by Nik Houser
  • High school for the dead. But not the anime.
• A Troop [Sic] of Baboons, by Tyler Smith
  • Baboons finally gain sentience and what do they do? CHAOS THEATER. Well, that's what I call it. 
• Pieces of Scheherazade, by Nicole Kornher-Stace
  • I love Nicole Kornher-Stace's work.Her book Archivist Wasp was one of my favorite books of 2017-2018. I finished reading it at the first of the year. Her contribution to this anthology is a retelling of the Thousand and One Nights story, with tattoos. 
• The Man Who Married a Tree, by Tony D'Souza
  • I call this weird backwoods (quite literally) fiction. It made me think there should be a lumberpunk genre.
• A Fable with Slips of White Paper, by Kevin Brockmeier
  • Imagine going to a thrift store and buying the overcoat that used to belong to God. It's like that. 
• Lazy Taekos, by Geoffrey A. Landis
  • Lazy Taekos is not so good with his hands, and he is lazy, but he has a trick and a riddle or two up his sleeve. Will it be enough to win him the princess? 
• Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot, by Daniel Alarcon.
  • An alternate history that imagines a modern era where Abraham Lincoln was president and still assassinated. Lived through the recollections and grief of his male lover as his current relationship is ending. Poignant and strange. 

​This is an older collection, published in 2007. It is edited by fantasy master Jeff VanderMeer and his wife, Ann VanderMeer. 

I picked up a used copy of this book on Amazon for about five bucks, Unfortunately, there is no Kindle edition. It's well worth grabbing a used copy of this great weird as fuck little anthology for your bedside or commuter reading pleasure. 

​2017 rounded out to be a year where I read mostly manga. A lot of Haikyuu!!  Some yaoi (guy x guy romance) and yuri (girl x girl romance) in Japanese culture, because I had wanted to, one day, study and maybe teach a literature class on gay and lesbian life as portrayed in Japanese popular culture (manga and anime). I read some fantasy, got totally on a Robin Hobb kick (if you don't know her, you should read her). 

This year, I want to finish some books that I started in 2017 and never finished. I want to read some more fantasy and weird stuff. Keep reading my favorite manga. Here is a small list of books I hope to add to my "I've read it" list and Goodreads challenge:

• The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Jeff Vandermeer
• Best American Fantasy, ed. Jeff Vandermeer
• Haikyuu!! Volume 29. THE TWINS! Karasuno faces a rough challenge in the Nationals Volleyball Tournament, by Haruichi Furudate
• James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips. One of sci fi's greatest award-winning authors from the early days had a big secret: he was actually a she. 
  
• Bad Feminist, by Roxanne Gay. I have been wanting to read this for a long time. 
  
• Archivist Wasp, by Nicole Kornher-Stace. Excellent and weird take on ghosts and ghost-hunting.
• The Signalman, by Charles Dickens 
  
• The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster. This and Dickens because I have heard that both are strange little stories. Forster's tale is the only science fiction he ever wrote. 
• Collected Stories, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
  
• The Mad Ship and Fool's Assassin (#1 in the Fitz and the Fool trilogy), by Robin Hobb (my Robin Hobb obsession will continue).
• 19 Days, by Old Xian. Boy's love web comic of a high school boy trying to get out of the friend zone with his best friend. Hilarious and fun and positive. Chinese addition to my yaoi studies. Not really a book but my weekly web comic obsession. 
• Akatsuki no Yona (Yona of the Dawn), by Mizuho Kusanagi. Shojo (romance) adventure of an exiled princess and the dragon warriors who offer their lives for her. 
  

I have other books that I want to read, but for now, these will keep me busy for at least a third or half the year. 

What's on your 2018 reading list?