Category: side projects (Page 1 of 4)
I check my email way too often. I don’t even really want to check it most of the time, but it’s just something *to do*, something to click on, something to tap on my phone. Most of the time it’s pointless. I mean, has anyone really emailed me between now and the five minutes prior when last I checked my inbox?
No. No, of course not.
But I check anyway. “Who knows?” my addicted brain always says. “It’s possible a new message came in.”
So I click and suddenly I’m not just checking email but surfing the internet in general, clickity click click clicking away.
Ugh.
I decided I need to commit to checking my email TWICE a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon, and beyond that, nothing more. But it’s not enough to quit doing something. I need to replace the itchy email urge with something better. Something that will make me *feel* way better than the yuck feeling I get from wasting the day checking email and surfing the web.
I thought doing something analog, something with my hands that wasn’t clicking a mouse or tapping a keyboard, might be the way to go, thus was born my idea of doing “The No-Surf Files,” aka a mini zine about whatever random thoughts are in my head when I’m trying to avoid the internet.
I did Issue #0 yesterday, and it was pretty fun and got me away from the computer. I have yet to do Issue #1 because I haven’t really been tempted to surf the internet aimlessly, and because I’m sticking pretty closely to my “check email twice a day” rule. I did check my email three times yesterday, but that’s only because I was trying to figure out the time for a school fundraiser event, and they hadn’t yet emailed the information to us. But besides that, I’ve kept myself off the email merry-go-round.
I already have several blank mini zines folded and ready to go, so now it’s just a matter of waiting for that icky internet urge to start itching, and voila! I will have my no-surf mini zines waiting for me to fill.
Seven years ago, I hadn’t yet started my career as an independent author. I was still finding my way as a writer, so I decided to write a NaNoWriMo novel based on my memories of childhood.
It wasn’t a memoir, though. I’m a fantasy author. I wanted there to be some magic in this story, so I had to make it fictional. My inspiration was Ray Bradbury and his beautiful ode to childhood, Dandelion Wine, a novel I hold dear to my heart.
So I invented Sarah Lewis, a ten-year-old from California who spends the summer with her grandparents in Michigan.
(“Sarah Lewis” by the way is an homage to two icons from my childhood: Sarah, the name of the lead character in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, and Jenny Lewis, child star of the 80s and early 90s. I wished I could be them when I was a kid.)
I worked on the NaNoWriMo novel for awhile back in 2015, but then I set it aside and started work on my first published novel, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Treasures came out just after I had given birth to my second child (in 2016), and I was all set to start working on book two of the Merlin’s Last Magic series, when I found out I was pregnant again.
This third pregnancy threw me for a loop, and to take my mind off the mounting pressure to finish my Merlin series, I returned to my little side project.
Avalon Summer became my low-pressure respite from the demands of my day job, motherhood, and trying to write the next book in my fantasy series. When I was working on Avalon Summer, I could return to the days of my childhood: to the early 90s, to endless bike rides, to playing adventures in the woods. I would cue up my old R.E.M. albums and just write, remembering what it was like to be a kid again.
I worked on this book off-and-on for several years, just dipping into it when I needed a break from normal life.
But then about a year or so ago, something happened. I started to work on Avalon Summer A LOT. Maybe it was the pandemic, or maybe it was just the right time for it, but I became so caught up in Sarah’s story that my nice little side project became the main event. I started working on Avalon Summer all the time.
And then something else happened.
In the course of the story, Sarah finds a dusty old paperback called Gates to Illvelion. It contains some eerie parallels to her own life.
When I was writing about the paperback and its effect on Sarah, I realized I needed to make up some chapter titles, some characters, and some plot points for this non-existent book to fit into my narrative for Avalon Summer.
So I did.
And then I decided to write the entire book.
The result — Gates to Illvelion — is an homage of sorts to the pulpy genre fantasy of the 1970s. Inspired by writers such as Peter S. Beagle, Patricia McKillop, and Andre Norton, I wrote Gates to Illvelion as something ten-year-old Sarah would get immersed in and even disturbed by.
I wrote it under a pen name — A.R. Rathmann — and not to spoil things too much, but I decided to make the identity of A.R. Rathmann a plot point in Avalon Summer.
If this sounds a little confusing, well, it is.
I wrote a coming-of-age novel in which a young girl is obsessed with a fantasy book by a mysterious author, and then I went and wrote the fantasy book this young girl becomes obsessed with.
Because of the nature of these two projects, I decided to do a Kickstarter campaign that showcased the connection between these two books. Readers scrolling through Amazon wouldn’t know or understand that Gates to Illvelion is a new release pretending to be an old vintage paperback. And they certainly wouldn’t understand that Gates to Illvelion plays a role in the plot to another novel, Avalon Summer, a coming-of-age story about a girl spending the summer with her grandparents in Michigan.
These two books have a story behind their creation. The Kickstarter was my way of sharing that story.
But now the books are getting released to the general public on May 30, 2023, so I thought a blog post was in order to explain the connection between them. Buyers scrolling through Amazon still won’t know the connection between Gates to Illvelion and Avalon Summer, but I’m hoping word of mouth will provide some illumination.
Of course, each book can be read independently of the other. They aren’t connected except in a meta, self-referential way.
And I’ve kept the pen name “A.R. Rathmann” separate from my “Jennifer M. Baldwin” identity. A.R. Rathmann is listed as a separate author on the retailer websites and on Goodreads. Perhaps this isn’t the best tactic marketing-wise, but it’s how I wanted to do things.
Summer is almost here, and so are Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion. I hope you’ll want to sit on the handlebars and come along for the ride.
I’ve been trying to start this habit for AGES. Everyone who works and has kids seems to swear by waking up in the wee hours of the morning and getting their writing done before anyone else is up. They make the sacrifice to go to bed earlier, or simply give up some of their sleep, so they can devote time to their writing.
It sounds like a good solution, right? If life is busy and there’s no time for pursuing one’s creative work during the day or evening, then get up before dawn and do the work then. Simple. Effective. Before you know it, you’ve written a novel in your little early morning productivity hour.
Except, I have always struggled with this strategy. I can train myself to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier (or, as often happens, sacrifice my sleep), but what I cannot do is form coherent, interesting, or evocative sentences in the pre-dawn hours. I just can’t. My brain doesn’t have any thoughts or ideas that early in the morning. 6:00 a.m. is for shaking the fuzz out of my head, not for making up stories.
And if I wasn’t going to be an early morning writer, then I’d have to be a night time writer, slinking down to the computer after putting the kids to bed and trying to plunk out a few plot points before exhaustion claimed me. But that’s just it: by the time night rolls around I’m EXHAUSTED and cannot form many coherent thoughts either.
I know this sounds like a lot of whining, but there’s a somewhat happy ending here. You see, today, I tried again with the morning writing thing. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and headed down to the writing computer, and I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything else but write fiction. No writer’s notebook. No reading. No nothing. Just plunk those keys to make some sentences and write the next line in the story. I was going to force myself to write, and by some kind of miracle, I did! I wrote about 800 words in a little less than an hour.
Now, this was just one day, and one day doesn’t make a pattern or a habit. But I figure if I keep doing this every day, if I keep forcing myself to write (even if the writing is crap-ay), then over time, my mind and body will be trained to associate early morning wake ups with heading down to the computer to write.
This kind of pattern/habit building happened to me recently with my back injuring in late December. I was in so much pain (mostly down my leg due to my nerve being pinched) that the only relief I could get was to walk slowly around the house. I had to do — I mean I HAD to do it or I would be in excruciating pain — and because I did it every day without fail when I woke up in the morning, I started doing it automatically. Alarm goes off, do some stretches, roll out of bed, start walking. I used that walking time to listen the the Liturgy of the Hour, so that became part of my daily ritual as well.
And after fourteen weeks of waking up and walking around the house every dang morning, I find that I simply cannot start the day without doing it. My brain doesn’t even make the conscious decision anymore. I get out of bed and start walking. That’s just what I do.
I’m hoping to develop the same pattern/habit with my writing in the morning. Just like my walking, I don’t have to do it perfectly. Most of my morning walks are me hobbling along at a snail’s pace just to get my back and legs feeling normal again. It’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be pretty. The walking is what’s important, and the repetition that builds the habit.
So tomorrow, after I wake up and walk, I’ll head downstairs to the computer and start typing. I’ll write anything — a new short story, the continuation of an old one, the prologue to a novel, a random sentence in the middle of my work-in-progress — and I won’t think too hard or too much about it. I’ll just force myself to write, just like I had to force myself to walk despite the agonizing pain.
Knowing that I have to be a little hard on myself to keep the pattern going, it will be worth it if I can change this aspect of my writing process and work habits.
Today’s only the first day. Maybe after I’ve been at it for a week or two, I’ll revisit how this experiment is shaping up. I hope I can make it stick this time.
I don’t know if this is a worthwhile challenge for myself, but maybe I should try blogging every day again.
(To use the word “again” feels like a bit of a stretch. In late 2020/early 2021, I almost managed to blog every day… for a few weeks. But when March rolled around, I was back to sporadic posts and self-loathing. So, to say I’m doing this “again” feels misleading. Anyway. The point is, I’m gonna try blogging every day.)
The trouble with a challenge like this is that my life is filled with the ups and downs of raising young children, and there’s a reason Hollywood directors don’t like working with kids or animals. I can have the best intention of blogging every day, and then suddenly I’m taking care of three sick kids with a stomach bug, or someone’s broken their arm, or they’ve all declared war against each other over who gets to play with the big foam blocks.
I hate setting a challenge for myself and then not completing it. Story of my life, unfortunately.
But I’ve being doing a private challenge for the past several weeks, and that challenge is still going strong despite the hectic life I sometimes lead. Back in the beginning of March, I made a commitment to write at least one sentence of fiction every day (with Sundays being an optional day), and since March 6, I haven’t missed a single week. There are days when I can only write one sentence, but I still write it and count it as a day in my habit tracker
Maybe something similar can be applied to blogging. I might not write long, epic posts every day, but I’ll post something. I’ll write a quick missive about what I read or watched or listened to, or something I noticed the kids playing, or an update on how my writing is going. I don’t know. Kind of a “show your work” project.
I still want to write longer, more in-depth blog posts, but perhaps I can work on those slowly while also posting my shorter, day-to-day ones. A bit like how I write my newsletter.
I might fail this challenge, but I’m still gonna take it on. I’m nothing if not persistent, I guess.
The campaign for Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion has begun on Kickstarter
I can’t believe I’ve already reached my funding goal and unlocked all the stretch goals! I’m in shock, frankly. Everything else at this point is gravy.
Both of these novels aren’t coming out officially until summer 2023, so to get advanced copies, consider backing the Kickstarter.
I’m offering both ebook and paperback versions of both (with some special perks if you pledge at higher levels), as well as stretch goals that include two short stories and a digital copy of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, so please join the campaign if you can!
