Rhino Puzzlings

We were discussing the "one day novel" in our informal writer's group meeting this week, as in "one day, I'll write a novel." Looking back, I've overcome a lot of personal one-day bucket list items: One day, I'll clean up that draft and send it to beta readers One day, I'll incorporate those comments back into the draft One day, I'll proofread it One day, I'll publish another ebook One day, I'll learn how to typeset One day, I'll learn this drawing software One day, I'll set up the author web site and blog (hi!) One day, I'll go back to social media   One day, I'll do a public reading  One day, I'll find a reader It's good to take inventory now and then, to realize how many one-days are done. It's hard, sometimes, when we see all the steps ahead of us to realize that the only way we have this new view is by taking steps to reach it. Yes, there's another mountain again, but don't lose sight of the ...

📕 After literal months of writing, reading, re-writing, re-reading, hounding beta readers, finding typos, wrestling with cover art, learning typesetting  and all the other tiny fussy bits, I pulled the trigger and ordered a printed proof of @TheRealJoyG and this week, it arrived! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Michael P. Clemens (@mpclemens.writes) So far, I've just handed it to people and said "look through this and tell me that it looks like a real book to you." I'll obsessively hunt for typos another day, but for now, I'm just enjoying the heft of this simple thing, this proof-of-work and a delightfully human analogue artifact. It's going on place of pride on the writing shelf for sure. 🧩🦏

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a typo will lurk in your work until it's time to share it. I swear I've read and re-read The Fall and Rise numerous times, but I swear these typos have been dormant until the typesetting finish line wobbled into view. Right when I needed an accurate page count, and my "the the" repetitions and bizarre grammatical hiccups came out of hiding. I'm making surgical strikes in the text to fix these up before shipping off the manuscript to various print-on-demand distributors. At least I'm keeping myself amused with the novelty and variety of weirdness. No slop here! These are 100% handmade goofs.  In other news,  Trouble  will be heading out to beta readers soon, once I finish awkwardly approaching people about it. My first reader is mercifully finding all the weirder turns of phrase in that one ("did you mean to leave out a verb here?") and making sure the story hangs together. Watch this space for details. Oh...

That's the state of things here: perpetual learning. Writing is a discovery process, and some of my best writing moments have some in the place of  pleasant unexpected surprises , when a character reveals themselves or a plot point unfolds unplanned, and we're off and romping after the next energy of the story. It's certainly possible for me to plan a story to death, and it's my nature to adhere rigidly to a plan if I've made on. Writing demands more flexibility, though, and I like the experience of that flex, the bending of rules and the discovery of the unexpected that comes from the bending. Book design is a whole other beast. I've tried my hand at covers , trying to keep both my limited budget and more limited skills in mind. They're good enough for what I need them to be. Book  interiors  are another world. I happen to have a copy of someone's self-published novel, which I won't name here, but it illustrates the expectations that we have as read...

I was doomed from the start to love words. I remember visiting Colonial Willliamsburg a few times as a child, one of those "living museum" reconstructions of the actual, original site. For a bookish child, it offered plenty of sensory wonders (hot cookies! hedge maze! cannon firing!) and scholarly interest (archeology! period materials! hot cookies!) One of my favorite locations, besides the bakery, was the print shop , with its actual functioning press. I was in love with the marbled paper they produced and sold, because a marbled endpaper in a book to me meant it was Classy and Important. Also, it just looked cool. How did they do it without it looking muddy and mixed-up? Magic, that's how. I was the kid that brought home a souvenir copy of the Bill of Rights, printed on "authentic-feeling"  material. So, I was a little strange, I'll admit, but there was something inherently magical about the ritual and dance of the printers moving around the great machine...

I took a long social media hiatus, starting around 2016 and really doubling down in 2020. I'd been quite active for a while, but personal and world events happened, as events do, and I decided to refocus my limited energies. Events kept happening without me, and that was fine.  No thanks, I'm good. I'm over here doing my own thing. Platforms come and go, and the pace of their arrivals-and-departures has always been rapid. Yesterday's Geocities begat MySpace begat Tumblr begat Facebook begat Instagram begat SnapChat begat TikTok, to trace one lineage. One advantage to having seen these rises and falls is the luxury to recognize the cycles, and know they'll come again. It's autumn now where I live, and our rainy season has begun, and the trees are being stripped of their last determined leaves. I know in the spring they will bud again. At some point, there will be a new begetting  in the platform ecosystem as well. "Too big to fail" doesn't apply to ...

I grew up in coal-mining country—see the forthcoming Trouble for a fictional variant—so perhaps that influenced the Americana we were taught in school. "John Henry versus the Steam Drill" was pretty well-known to me and my contemporaries from childhood onward, the battle of man versus machine. This legend doesn't end joyfully, unlike most American stories of Great Men Doing Great Things. John Henry would have been smarter to not go up against such an opponent, but then we wouldn't have the (tragic) tale of a man facing an impossible task, and the promise of a machine that could ease all the troubles away... for the tunnel's owner, anyway. It's bad luck for the hired help. I don't think we were being prepared for this particular world of LLMs and content-at-a-finger-press, but here we are. On reflection, there's a number of grim, accidental lessons of that story like "work hard, die anyway" or more bluntly, "capitalism kills." This ...

Q: Why the theme? What's all this  rhinoceros business? A: Way back in the before times, I narrated one of my old blog entries into the computer. Either the technology wasn't solid or my diction was ragged, but "NaNoWriMo" became "Nano Rhino" and thus my wee spirit animal sprung into being. The Nano Rhino served many as a mascot, cheerleader, coach, goad, comic foil, and general all-around muse-for-hire for the Typewriter Brigade, and all Wrimos feeling particularly rebellious in embracing old school over new cool. Not even the prescient powers of my tiny accidental companion could have predicted the sea change in how us silly, giant humans create new content. AI is here, it's not going away, and each of us needs to decide where we stand on it. For my personal creative efforts, I'm in camp No Thank You. The joy is in the creating, and in using our imperfect, slow, difficult brains. I've yet to see a prompt that brings lasting gratification. I p...

 I have absolutely no pretense of being an artistic wizard. I'm barely a crayon totin' acolyte, still attempting to color (approximately) within the lines. Since I'm self-publishing on basically a negative budget, I'm making the usual self-pub tradeoffs. Writing the book, it turns out, is the relatively easy part. Making it lovely is something that I'm grappling with, and having to dust off the underused corners of my brain to manage. I have just enough vocabulary to know what the basics are that I'm trying to accomplish, and at least have a vision to know what to aim for. Execution is where it's falling a little, let's say, flat. At this point, with one book out the door, my expectations are low. What I'm trying to remember is that the bar to failure is actually quite high. I've self-published before... once... over a decade ago. There are numerous problems with that first book, but, as was the case then and even more now, it was a drop in the c...

The end of October naturally follows into November, and I'm still getting my bearings after the shutdown and scattering of NaNoWriMo a few years back. From the outside, the collapse appeared—bluntly—catastrophic, and for those of us who'd seen it from early days, it was especially painful to watch. NaNo was the nursery that fostered me, that gave me the courage to try to write something large and messy and wild and surprising and  just not worry about it. I'm proud to say I won every November I participated, seventeen in all. I tried the off-season writing (Camp) but it never really stuck with me the same way November's event did. I credit the lack of daylight, the turn in the weather, the general  gloom  to fostering the mood to sit down and scribble, even if Novembers in my part of the world are generally mild, often sporadically sunny, and all around tolerable. There's other events, indie or sponsored, commercial or personal, and I admire folks for keeping the fl...

Book launch!   The Fall And Rise of @TheRealJoyG  is out the door and currently for sale exclusively on Amazon as a Kindle ebook. I plan to go wide with other distributors after the mandated time period, and to use that window to prep a paperback edition. Oh, and work on all the other titles I've got going, too.  Influencers! Villany! Mildly Comedic Family Drama! Las Vegas! Poor Life Choices! and more. Available now at everyone's favorite mega retailer. 🧩🦏 

 Rhinos may be solitary, but writers can't go it alone. Or at least, that's what I'm reminding myself these days. I've got a lot of drafts--a whole oversize bin of typescripts--all hammered or scribbled out in relative anonymity and the safety of knowing that  nobody will ever read them.  And without being held accountable for quality, that elided into  and nobody has to edit them, either.  Because for an audience of one, I don't need to please anyone, or deal with all those linguistic luxuries like "good grammar" and "understandable plot" and "deadly dull dialogue." First drafts are notoriously shitty things, but if they just remain so, then all I have is a bin of... well, crap. The spark that turned it around was actually investing time to edge out of the reclusive-scribbler comfort zone and get into a  safe writerly space.  A safe  sharing  space, specifically, which felt more than a little frightening. I'd been drafting novels f...

There's nothing my Muse ( she/her ) likes better than stillness. Over the years of our partnership, we've agreed on the terms of our relationship: namely, that I show up, hoping to write, and if she's in the neighborhood, will deign to drop by and leave me some raw material. It's a dysfunctional partnership, but it's ours. What matters (for her) is that I'm showing up, pen poised, mine relatively clear, ready to go. This... is not easy. "Relatively clear" is not my state of mind most days, before the whole stare-of-the-world gets factored in. Honestly, some days, the Muse could pull up in her ride, ready to toss an institutional brick through my proverbial mental plate-glass window, but I'm too preoccupied to hear her show up. And she doesn't accept being ignored. She gets sulky. Withdrawn. Reluctant. And ultimately: erratic, maybe the worst thing for a Muse to be when she's tethered to someone with a full life. Why do all the good ideas co...

For continuity, and a vain attempt at SEO, this writing rhino was previously blogging at  clickthing.blogspot.com   This place is less gadget-focused and more writing-oriented but it's still me. Hiya! The NanoRhino is all growed up, glowed up, and navigating the world of publishing.  🧩🦏