Rhino Puzzlings

 It's the first draft. It is supposed to be garbage.Utter and complete garbage. I don't think many people realize how bad a first draft truly is. I think it's considered to be "almost done except for typos lol ." No. It's trash. It's the merest sketch of the final shape of your story. It is the discovery draft where you uncover details about your characters you didn’t know, where new plot avenues open up where before was dead ends. It is the vomit draft, barf draft, shitty draft. It is where you set aside all the knowledge about style, pacing, grammar, and spelling and let it flow. Hand-write it if you can, or even type on an analog device. Pry up your backspace key and turn off the spellcheck. Words on the page are all that matter here, even if those words are "I hate this story and all the people in it." Write those, explain how you hate them, how you would torture them if they were real. Let them defend themselves against you...

Well, that's the hope, anyway. I've added a section to the site on self-publishing, specifically on the process and tools that I use. There are times when I feel like I'm fumbling around like everyone else, collecting wisdom magpie-style in bookmarks and a notes app. But it has been a solid year, and we're coming up on the first anniversary of @TheRealJoyG's publication date, and I did collect a lot of information in that lead up. If I can offer a steady shoulder for someone else to stand on, so be it. Now the circle is complete, the student has become the master, the lost has become the loser, etc.. One thing we focus on in our weekly creative writing classes, and that we talk about in our casual library meetups is  the process.  And I wish I could say that I had a pure and beautiful process, but I don't. It's mainly a lot of scribbling random thoughts in random places, collecting it, and then pushing it together until it might form something resembling ...

Looking Back  It's been a year since I launched this site, just before I published The Fall and Rise of @TheRealJoyG and dragged my indie-publisher hat back out, dusted it off, and said "right, what's changed since 2012?" Answer: quite a bit and also not so much. Quite a bit: social media and self-promotion are entirely different now, shifting from communities to commodities. We're enmired in the rise in generative AI technologies, and the costs to creativity, the environment, and human creativity. The big names have gotten bigger and the indies and the small names are feeling the squeeze. Not so much:  The craft of writing is still a craft, no matter how mechanized or machine-masticated it may be. I'm hopeful for the pushback against the Slop era. The best way to create is to still pick up a pen, or a brush, or a camera, or an instrument and try. Striving, failing, succeeding and growing haven't changed.  This has never been easy. Looking Ahead I'm ...