Month: January 2025

The Motern Method

January 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Book just came in the mail. Haven’t read it yet, but will report back later when I do.

I first heard of The Motern Method and Matt Farley on Austin Kleon’s substack. The whole question of quantity versus quality and how much we should share is something I’ve been interested in for quite some time.

I really, really want to follow Heinlein’s Rules as championed by Dean Wesley Smith, so I’ve tended to lean on the side of “share it all” — or “Put it on the market” in Heinlein’s parlance — which is definitely NOT the attitude of most artists, and which can seem a bit “icky” in the case of someone like Farley, if you think what he’s doing isn’t art. I don’t write stuff in order to game the system or the algorithm or whatever. But then, I also don’t think Farley is just trying to game the system either. He wants to write songs and he wants people to listen to them. Why not write hundreds of poop songs? Nobody said art had to be serious.

If what Farley does is art, then who cares if his songs are silly or designed to get people to click on them?

But if what Farley does isn’t art, then that’s where we might accuse him of cynically manipulating the system.

I kind of think he’s an artist, so I’m kind of okay with his crazy output.

Anyway, I ordered his manifesto, The Motern Method, partly because I’m interested in these quantity/quality debates, and also because I am trying to banish my Critical Voice and embolden my Creative Voice, and Farley’s method seems ideal for such attempts.

I have reading I need to do for work, but The Motern Method is calling me like an algorithmic siren song…

Goal: Finish Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess

January 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This one was always going to be a challenge. It’s a tortured history, and I might not be ready to confront it.

I wrote the first Merlin book in roughly 2014-2016 (exact dates are fuzzy because it was so long ago, which is exactly why my goal to finish Ysbaddaden is so fraught).

That was almost ten years ago, when I published The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Not too long afterward, in January 2017, I wrote a Merlin prequel short story, and I started the second book of the trilogy, a book about the giant Ysbaddaden, a chess game between Merlin and his arch-nemesis, and the continued hunt for the treasures of Britain.

Yeah. It was gonna be great. It was gonna rock. I was gonna finish this book and get it out, then write the third one and have a complete trilogy and be awesome, yay, yay, yay.

Then, after I had completed the trilogy (so my plan was planned), I was gonna write more. So much more. Dozens more. Dozens upon dozens. Ideas for more books, more series, more stories. I had so much more I wanted to write.

So, while I was excited about the Merlin trilogy, I also had plans for more. I needed to get “through” the Merlin stuff to get to all the other stuff I wanted to write.

I was excited for Ysbaddaden, yes, but I was also nervous about it. It wasn’t something I had a clear idea about plot-wise. I knew roughly what I wanted to see happen, but I also wanted to discover new things as I wrote. This is my way. Discovery writing.

I started writing, started the journey roughly in 2017, but then life stuff happened. Another pregnancy happened. And the excitement of the Merlin trilogy began to chafe against my unclear idea of what would happen with Ysbaddaden. In those days, I didn’t have a good handle on how to deal with “stuckness” as a discovery writer. And I was stuck. Stuck physically (with the pregnancy), stuck emotionally (also with the pregnancy), and most especially stuck with the story.

I didn’t like the direction Ysbaddaden was going. And I couldn’t find time to write.

This went on for at least a couple of years. Honestly, I have a bad memory, so I’m not sure when things really started going off the rails, but off they went, and soon enough I realized I needed to scrap twenty-thousand words and redraft huge sections of the work-in-progress.

The redrafting was better, and I started to find a good footing with the story, but then two of my side projects started to become main projects. I finished Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion during the time when I was “supposed” to be finishing Ysbaddaden.

By 2023, I had published those two side project books, but I still had a half-completed manuscript for the second book in a trilogy I first started publishing in 2016. And instead of barreling ahead with Ysbaddaden, I decided to start ANOTHER book, Norse City Limits.

So, as I indicated above. Fraught.

This is probably a Critical Voice problem. Fear that the second book will be worse than the first. Fear that my ideas are stupid and I’ll ruin the series.

But even more than fear, I think what’s happened is that I’ve lost the momentum. I can already tell that momentum is starting to wane with NCL too. Turns out, I need to keep momentum going on a project or else risk losing interest. I’m like a kitten or puppy, distracted by every shiny thing that comes my way.

Going forward, with new projects, the key will be to keep the momentum going and not get too rolled by hiccups and life events.

But for these older projects, for the eternal project that is Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, I need to somehow regain the momentum. With NCL, I think I’ve managed it, but only time will tell. My goal is to finish it by March. Then, it’s on to Ysbaddaden, trying to finish it in the second quarter.

Regaining momentum on a long-delayed project is not easy. Frankly, I’m not sure how to do it. The best I can figure is the old stand-by for when I feel creatively stalled: More input.

If (for both NCL and Ysbaddaden) I can start reading and watching and listening to stuff that fuels my creative voice, then I might be able to rev the motor and restart. Reignite.

The NCL input list includes the aforementioned Myths and Symbols book by H. R. Ellis Davidson, as well as a long list of film noir (a list I might post on the blog in a soon-ish timeframe).

For Ysbaddaden, the list includes The Sandman comics, tons of medieval romances like Tristan and Isolde, the Lais of Marie de France, and Parzival. And, of course, the ur-text for all my Welsh Arthurian stuff: The Mabinogi. Throw in some Tennyson, some T. H. White, and maybe even some Susan Cooper, and add a dash of my favorite old fantasy films like Labyrinth and Excalibur, and I’ll be good to go.

This the hope, anyway. Maybe this time will be different.

I do know that I need to stay connected to the story once I start writing it again. I have to work on it a little bit every day so that the momentum never falters too much. And I have to keep the whole thing fun. Momentum and fun. I’m learning that these are MY key factors for finishing. Momentum and fun.

I think what hurt me way back in 2017 was that I was overwhelmed with life stuff and the writing was harder and harder to fit into my life. I made the book “important” and put myself under pressure to write it. The importance and the pressure and all the personal stuff just stalled me. And instead of being gentle with myself and going easy on the self-criticism, I went self-critical HARD. I beat myself up for my lack of progress, and that made progress all the harder to come by.

I’ve grown a lot as a writer since 2017. I know how to handle stuckness a little better, and I know that I’m really doing quite a lot, actually, so I don’t need to beat myself up about it. The most important thing is that I haven’t given up.

Ten Years Zine

January 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The way I got to this little project was via reading old newsletters from my inbox. I have a problem with not deleting emails, and also with not always reading things that I want to read. The never-ending stream of emails continues apace, and then the ones I want to read get lost in the cascade until eventually it’s been five years and I still have dozens upon dozens of unread newsletters that I really want to read.

So, the other day, I scrolled back half a decade and started catching up on old mail.

This one, from Austin Kleon, struck me as a fun challenge, so when I needed a break from grading papers, I decided to give it a go. I most definitely took more than 20 minutes to do it.

Turns out #1. I have a pretty terrible memory. I should have spent some time rereading old notebooks or at least looking at a calendar or something, because I really could not remember what happened circa 2015 or between 2018-2019. I remembered 2016 and 2017 only because I had my sons in those years.

And, of course, #2. The Year 2020.

I didn’t bother adding everything that happened that year. “COVID” and a few random words like, “Masks!” were enough to convey the memory. Because it’s all too much, and also too numb to be captured on a tiny zine page. Even now, five years later. It’s not that I particularly suffered all that much from the virus we know as “Covid-19,” (thank God, my family was lucky), but the world suffered, and since I live in the world, my world tilted as a result. I can’t even say exactly when it started tilting — maybe it was also in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 — but 2020 was when it tipped over. I fell over and flipped back up again, somehow different. Honestly, world-views were shattered. They’re still shattering. I went full-Idler.

Anyway, after the rupture of Covid, it’s like the years couldn’t contain everything that happened to me. The zine pages weren’t enough; I couldn’t fit myself in. Ink everywhere, everything at random, new memories popping up just as I thought I’d finished with the pages. No births, but some deaths, and even the biggest one, I couldn’t fit, or didn’t want to fit — it was beyond the format — and trying to catalog the rush of change and then reversion and then change and then–

I didn’t realize my decade could be divided so neatly between “ordinary” — ho-hum, having babies and raising them and work and whatever, to the point where I couldn’t recall the distinct days — and “momentous” — the rush and rumble of a boulder rolling downhill, of huge changes, bad changes, good changes, trials and errors (so many errors), (so many trials), and now I’m back where I seemingly started from in 2015: in the thick of teaching, raising my children, trying to write and publish, and wondering if I’ll ever get the hang of any of it.

But I’m definitely different. That much is true.

Which is good. One should probably change after ten years.

Ten Titles, Ten Characters (from my notebook, January 2024)

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I was flipping through my notebooks from 2024, mostly to see how many books I’d read in the past year (more than 40, by the way… so not bad, but now I’m thinking I want to set a challenge for myself to read over 60 this year), when I came across an entry from my January notebook that included two “Try Ten” lists.

One was ten titles, one was ten characters. Here are the lists:

Ten Titles

  1. Bicycle Repair
  2. Professor _________’s Guide to the Magically Perplexed
  3. Went Away Sailing
  4. Grandma’s Gnocchi
  5. I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream
  6. Brennivin. Shot. Cold.
  7. Stolen Goods
  8. The Voice in the Heating Vent
  9. Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat
  10. Whenever You Think of Criticizing

Ten Characters

  1. An old cop who serves evictions now
  2. The ghost of a young woman’s dead twin
  3. A boy who is in love with his best friend
  4. A foreign cleaning lady
  5. A tree that can communicate with a human
  6. An old man who stole a fellow soldier’s ID back in Vietnam
  7. The driver of a bus that takes devils in and out of Hell
  8. A middle-aged woman who once got to spend her afternoons with a unicorn but hasn’t seen one in decades
  9. An oracle/fortune teller who has lost her power
  10. A man who must take care of his sick wife in quarantine (he hasn’t seen her in a week?)

I’ll admit, that last character entry doesn’t quite make sense to me looking back at it now. Has he not seen her in a week but now can see her and must take care of her? Or has he been taking care of her in quarantine but she left him and hasn’t been seen in a week?

I really don’t know.

The funny thing is that I used one of those titles and wrote a short story to go along with it. “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream.” It was a writing challenge I did with my Creative Writing students where we had to write a short story in one hour. I participated and used this title.

The story turned out all wrong. I tried writing an unreliable narrator and it was an utter failure. Just didn’t live up to the title at all. And I tried an ironic twisty ending that was pretty stupid, frankly.

But I still like the title. I’m tempted, even now, to use the title again and write a different story. And why not?

In fact, it might be kind of funny to write several short stories, all with the same title, all different, and then put them together into a collection.

Or maybe that would be utterly not funny but just kind of stupid. I have a difficult time distinguishing between the cool and the stupid until I’ve done the thing. Before I’ve done the thing, it seems pretty cool. After I’ve done the thing, it feels pretty stupid. I have two choices, then: either keep doing the cool-sounding thing, hoping one day it won’t turn out stupid, or stop doing any of the cool-sounding things. Which means I’ll have done nothing.

I think I know which choice to make.

Better to write a dozen (or more) stupid stories than to write none at all.

Anyway, some of these ideas and characters and titles don’t sound particularly interesting at the moment, but I often wonder if these little seeds and sparks of ideas might turn out to be pretty great once put into action. It’s the action that matters. The telling of the tale. Because otherwise they’re just a list of words. I could write a dozen stories called “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream” and they would all be different. Who can say, just from that title, what stories may come?

This is why the ideas really don’t matter all that much. I can come up with ten more ideas right now. So can any of us.

It’s the weaving of the story that matters. The particular sequence of the tale is what counts.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if I combined a title from one list with a character from the other. Might be a fun game. What kind of challenge could I make for myself in this new month of a new year. From two lists in January 2024 to ten stories in January 2025…

To do that, I’d have to get over my trepidation. My worry that I’m not up to the task of writing ten stories in one month. Can I do that? Can I get over that hump, that lack of confidence?

My husband said that the word he would use to describe my 2024 was “confidence,” but I just don’t see it. I feel the opposite, like my confidence is slowly draining away. But maybe he can see something I can’t.

I hesitate to even set a challenge like ten stories in one month because what if I can’t do it? What if it stresses me out? What if I simply don’t have the time, on top of all the other duties and goals I’ve already set?

Might be fun though… the old cop serving evictions, entitled “Went Away Sailing,” and the old cop has to serve someone who never seems to be home, who might have gotten on a sailboat and drifted away, and the cop tries to find them, to serve the papers, yes, but also, just to see what it would be like to sail away from everything…

The old fortune teller who has lost her gift… every time she tries to tell a fortune and see the future, she sees her grandmother, bent over the kitchen table, rolling out potatoes and flour to make the gnocchi dough… Maybe she has to talk to her grandmother, and maybe she can’t break through, she’s lost her gift, after all…

The foreign cleaning lady hears a voice in the heating vent…

The driver of the Hell-bus… “Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat…”

(I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. The question I always have as I make up these stories and possibilities, is will my story end up being worthwhile? Will it have any meaning? Any emotion? Will readers enjoy it, or am I simply playing a word-association game with myself?)

To write ten stories in four weeks means roughly two or three stories every week. That seems like a lot, especially as I try to get NCL finished. Maybe the challenge isn’t to do it just in January, but to do a story every week? Or try to write ten stories in the first quarter? Or… I don’t know. Something.

I feel a pull toward this challenge. It’s not a coincidence that I opened my January 2024 notebook to this page with these two lists. I should ride it out. See where it goes.

I always was dissatisfied with that first “Ursula Le Guin” story. Time to try again. And the new year is the perfect time.

Original header artwork

Copyright 2015 Chloe Bensinger

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