It Happened AGAIN!

OK, so last night this guy emailed me.  We used to work together - sort of.  He was a VP at this consulting firm I worked at right out of college.  I remember him not at all, and only remember a few things about this firm:

1. The consultants were, on the whole, conspicuously attractive people.
2. The consultants were, on the whole, lazy.  The few people who worked really hard kept the whole thing afloat, but they got less good-looking the harder they worked.  True fact.
3. At the time, I wanted to write a novel about a data analyst at a such a firm who discovers a big international plot and is recruited by the CIA... or turns out to be a spy all along...  or some such bullshit.  I couldn't figure out how else to make data analysis seem interesting.

Well, I just talked to this guy.  (He claims to remember me, which is either very flattering or an obvious lie.  I have an inflated ego, so I choose the former.)  And guess what?

HE WROTE THE NOVEL.  He wrote a novel about an international consulting firm that has something to do with spies.

It's sort of adorable that I ever imagine my ideas to be unique, or ever worry they aren't.  What they are, mostly, is just ideas.  Ideas are a dime a dozen; everyone has them.  Original idea is practically an oxymoron.  It's execution that matters.  This guy spent three years figuring out how to make consulting seem interesting, and another three years getting it published. 

Kudos man, kudos.

Better Sooner Than Later

I guess it was inevitable.  I have four novels in various states of completion.  Tonight I saw the movie trailer for one of them.  The exact same story.  The same opening scene! 

&^%$*! @#$%*!


Oh well, of the four novels, it was the least complete and least interesting.  Hopefully it was the least original too, right?

How Starting a Business is Like Writing a Novel

1. The Blank Page.

You start out with a general idea of where you're going, but there are no constraints - you can go anywhere.  The choices can be overwhelming.  You spend a lot of time meandering and no small portion completely lost.  Your final destination is practically invisible until you're practically on top of it.

2.  The Work.

It is so much more work than it looks like.  Every day you realize it requires another skill, another domain of knowledge, another chunk of time that you have to find a way to acquire.

3. The Qualification Paradox.

You know perfectly well you are woefully underqualified, and also that the only way to become qualified is to just do it.  So you fake it 'til you make it: spend every day pretending to yourself that you can do it until you discover you've actually done it.

4. The Business.

You have to figure out who you're selling to, what they want, how you can give them something they didn't even know they needed that can only come from you.  You have to figure out who you want on your team and how to attract them and how to deal with them.  You have to figure out where the time is going to come from.

5.  The Investors.

You have to decide if you want outside investment, who would be the best fit, and then polish your pitch.  And polish it some more.  And realize in the process that your product needs work and go back and polish that, and then come back and polish your pitch all over again.  Repeat.

BONUS.  The Courage and the Faith.

There is every reason to believe you will fail, and that it will hurt.  This is why most people will never try.  But those who do, who take the leap of faith, will tell you that creating something is a journey, not a test.  The concepts of success and failure over time are far murkier than you'd imagined.  At the end of the day, it is your journey and your courage that will make you proud and bring you happiness.

What Will You Leave in 2011?

At the beginning of my adult life, I was all about accumulation. I was going through my journey grabbing up experiences and things like a squirrel hording nuts against winter.  Then came the day I realized some of the things I was dragging along were holding me back, and an important person in my life pointed out the obvious yet profound truth that it's both OK and possible to leave some baggage behind.

So now this is part of my New Year's process: choosing a burden to abandon.  Of course, deciding to lighten the load is only the first step - implementation can take the whole year, maybe a lot longer.  Nonetheless, it has worked well so far.  Two years ago I left behind fear of not having a traditional job.  Last year I dropped some internally-imposed boundaries of who and what I could be. 

I think it's not coincidental that I also shed a great volume of physical objects from my possession in each of these years.

As for this year, well, I'm still deciding.  What about you?  Is there something you can go into 2012 without?

3 Interesting Facts from Techland

Here are a few things of interest to writing professionals:

Thing 1:  Businesses, especially online businesses, are constantly trying to claw their way up Google rankings.  The single most direct and effective way to do this is to constantly add fresh content to their website. 

Thing 2: Lots of businesses do not have the vision or the budget to generate new content or edit existing content, especially if they don't see themselves as being in the content business.

Thing 3: There are now companies writing software that automatically generates content.  For example, input sport scores and output game recap stories.  Input stock tickers and output market stories.  Input #whatevertopic twitter feed and output article on whatevertopic.  No human writer involved.

Does anyone else find this a little creepy and uncool?

Getting a Little Closer

Helloooooooo!  I'm hooooooooome! 

Boy, the dust is pretty thick around here, but at least there are no critter droppings.

So.  I've been away awhile.  Things got a leetle bit crazy this past year.  Where to begin?  Well, as documented in prior posts, I left my job at Major Well-Known Internet Company a bit less than two years ago and started a little consulting firm.  This has gone extremely well, better than I could have hoped, and yet has turned out to not be quite the fresh start I was looking for.  I am still me, after all, and before I knew it, my path veered sharply away from anything to do with writing and all the way back into my old stomping grounds of data management.  Suddenly I find myself in essentially the same job at a tech startup that I had left at Major Well-Known Internet Company - with all the same frustrations and far less time to write.

Oops.

Time to refocus.  Let's start with Lessons Learned:

1. I really enjoy this tech stuff, especially the part about being good at it.
2. I'm not too chicken to give up a good income to run my own business, but I am too chicken to give up a good income to write.
3. I enjoy all the stuff that goes with writing - talking with authors, learning about the craft, and following the industry - at least as much as I enjoy writing itself.

So, I'm course-correcting.  I'm not ready to dedicate time to writing, but I am leaving the new/old job to focus on a new project that has everything to do with writing minus actually writing.  Baby steps, right?

Brief Note, and Why I Have to Stop Bagging on Twilight

Hi Folks!  Just wanted to stop in and mention that I'm not dead.  I've just been unhealthfully absorbed in my job, sparing time only for family.

However, I just had to share something here, because I can't really share it anyplace else.  I just got an email from a high school friend.  As previously mentioned, I've been in my own little world lately, and had completely forgotten that she was supposed to be sending me something.  Well, in her email she apologized for the delay, and explained that she got sidetracked on another project: filming Breaking Dawn.

Can I just say holy shit?  HOLY SHIT.

Now, whatever I may feel about the Twilight series (and to be honest I've only read the first book), I have a policy of being 100% supportive of my friends.  Furthermore, I have to admit that I would give not one but two vestigial organs to play a badass vampire queen in a major motion picture.  So, it would be pretty craven of me to continue bagging on the franchise.  I just hope my friend has been too busy to read my Facebook updates...

Been Traveling

So, I got nothin' for ya right now.  My non-writing career is going gangbusters and I've been traveling a lot.  I just wanted to let you know that even though I haven't had to time to write much on this blog or anyone else's, I am lurking.

Love the Query Goblin!!

If you haven't already heard, blog buddy J.J. DeBenedictis has a new thing going: The Query Goblin.  You can submit you query and she will re-write it for you!  Or you can do what I do, which is pretend to be the Query Shark and provide your own analysis and suggestions in the comments.

I don't know what it is about these query workshops, but I just can't get enough of them!

That's It! I'm Writing a Vampire Story!

What is it with these things?  I mean, I hated Twilight.  I'm sick to death of seeing YA Vampire novels oozing out of bookstore walls - wasn't this trend supposed to be over by now?  And yet...  I love True Blood.  I loved Forever Knight.  I loved Interview with a Vampire.  I even loved Underworld.  And right now I'm reading the second in The Strain trilogy (conceived and co-written by Guillermo Del Toro, who also directed the surprisingly good Blade II).   And seriously, I could go on and on - my Nook library is disgustingly fang-infested.

Much has in fact been written on what makes Vampires stories are so appealing.  The difficulty there is that they aren't actually a genre.  Vampires are more like a motif that appears across genres, and the variety is pretty astonishing.  Compare the hyper-sexualized non-sentient vampires in Larry Niven's Sci Fi classic Ringworld to the biological evil in the thriller The Strain to the politics and romance in the Sookie Stackhouse novels.  Paranormal romance may be the most popular nesting ground on the modern Vampire, but he is hardly confined there.  The appeal is likewise different depending on what kind of vampires we're talking about, and what that genre's target market is.

If I were to write a vampire story, I would write one aimed directly at people like me: educated middle-aged women.  The protagonists would be adults and would not waste time whining about the unfairness of it all.  They would have awesome shame-free sex.  They would be concerned about maintaining careers and incomes and so forth in the face of obvious logistical problems.  They would be concerned about the realities of extreme age differences.  They would be concerned about the long-term future, since they could reasonably expect to be alive to see it.  They would consider the questions of immortality and morality with the wisdom of experience.

I know I know, there are already fifty such titles out there, right?  Well good!