Marc Rivers, Author

  • Working At My Own Pace

    I’ve finished chapter 10 of my novel’s second draft. Until this past weekend, progress on chapter 11 had been going pretty slowly. I feel guilty because part of me feels like I shouldn’t be having a hard time, considering this chapter has an interesting development in it. Even so, rewriting this (or any major sequence) for the second draft feels like I need to execute it as close to perfectly as I can. I know academically that this is folly, but I feel like the only alternative to a near-perfect scene is one where I just phone it in. I’m sure there’s plenty of middle ground in between those two, but one of my broken brain’s many flaws is that it likes to focus on the worst outcomes.

    In spite of those struggles, the second draft has just passed the 50,000-word threshold. I could technically end the book very abruptly right where it is (in deeply unsatisfying fashion) and it would still technically count as a novel. I wouldn’t do that, obviously, but 50k is still an important milestone. (Besides, I still have over 14 chapters to go.)

    Speaking of 50,000 words, I’m tossing around the idea of doing Novel November this year. I tried doing it once a few years ago to a resounding lack of success. To wit, I fell behind the pace very early on and then my father-in-law passed away, which understandably took up a lot of my focus.

    The idea was surfaced by someone in my local writer’s group. I think if enough of us commit to it and we keep each other in check on a regular basis, I could do a lot better this time around. I’m also about to take a short writing course at the local community college on writing a character-driven novel, so I’m eager to pick up some tricks and see how I can put them to use not just in my current project, but in some other ones I’ve got simmering on the side.

    Being among other writers, or reading about other writers’ processes, they sometimes discuss the timelines for projects they’ve done and it feels (to me) that a lot of them are able to work at a much faster pace than I can. Compared to my crawling pace, it’s as if these other authors are cranking out novels in their sleep.

    This requires me to be cognizant of the fact that my pace and my workflow can’t be someone else’s. That will never work. I can only work at the pace I’m able to. It’s constrained by other obligations and my own mental health. Could I be better at operating within those constraints? Sure. But what I can’t afford to do is compare myself to other writers who produce output faster than me and think it’s some reflection on my worth as a writer.

    In fact, “the output” should be among the least of my concerns right now. I’ve yet to be published for anything and unless I were to ever get to a point where I’m doing this for a living (which I don’t expect), the process is more important from the point of artistic value and self-fulfillment.

    In all honesty, if I only ever get one book published, that would be enough. My dream is to be able to go into a bookstore and see my book on the shelf. I know most publishers are more concerned about how to turn one book into several (for the sake of ongoing revenues), but until I come up with a banger idea for a trilogy, my focus will be on getting one (1) book physically published.

    And so, I press on. My hope for anyone reading this is that you’ll be able to do the same in whatever endeavor brings meaning to you. We’ve all been taught a lot of lessons that our worth is measured by the monetary value our effort produces, but those are false ideas. Make art for art’s sake. Write for writing’s sake. Be human. Enjoy nature. Screw capitalism! And, of course, be kind to one another.

    -Marc

  • On Changes

    My 12-year-old cat has been exhibiting some behavioral changes lately, so before I took him to the vet, I wasn’t sure if this week’s post would be an early eulogy for him or not. Thankfully, the news is not the worst it could be, although it’s still something that needs to be taken seriously.

    We’ve learned that he has diabetes and that there are two treatment paths for him. One involves twice-daily shots and another involves a daily pill that may or may not be as effective as the shots. Either way, life for him is about to change (again, that is; he’s already been through half a dozen moves just since I adopted him as a kitten, so it’s not like he’s altogether unfamiliar with upheaval).

    I’m going through some changes of my own, in fact. Nothing as drastic as diabetes, nor as Kafkaesque as waking up as a giant bug, but changes all the same. Evidently I have really high cholesterol, so we’re planning some lifestyle changes (the dreaded “diet and exercise”) in the hopes of not having to go on yet another medication. And all that is in the hopes of me not keeling over dead from a heart attack or stroke about 35 years too early.

    And of course, all of that is happening within the context of the continuing search for new employment, which has itself brought changes to how I need to approach my time and how I need to sell myself to employers.

    “The only constant is change,” as they say. Which is why I like to write in the fantasy genre, where global civilization is perpetually set in a late antiquity/early Medieval era and no one ever makes any discoveries or advancements that result in wholesale societal upheaval. (Seriously, why do we all default to that setting so readily?)

    I just finished reading a book about the collapse of the Bronze Age and at no point did I think to incorporate a wide-scale societal collapse and rebirth into my world-building. (I DO have a full-scale societal collapse written into the history, but no rebirth, only replacement via migration.) The transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age is a fascinating one, though, and one (or something analogous to it) that could be an excellent element in a fantasy setting, I feel. Perhaps it’s hard to write because of the confluence of so many factors. It may even come across as “too much” if it appeared in a fiction setting. Then again, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis pulled it off pretty well in the Dragonlance setting (albeit using a more immediate and dramatic transition from “the world before” to “the world after”).

    I actually do have an idea for how my fantasy setting could advance technologically and incorporate magic and machinery. Trouble is, I have no particular stories for such a setting; it’s just a (malleable) statement of fact that Estéa will eventually advance into a magical steampunk era. What to do with that fact, I have no idea just yet.

    Neither do I have any idea how to end this post. So I’ll do my usual thing and say, “Reject fascism, embrace creativity and artistry, and above all, be kind to each other. It’s the only way any of us are making it through all this mess.”

    Until next time,

    -Marc

  • Remembering When

    I don’t normally perform any sort of observance or commemoration of the September 11th attacks, but seeing as how this year is the 25th anniversary (already?!), perhaps it’s worth jotting some thoughts down.

    Obviously, everything changed that day. The world we thought we knew was shattered and the one that replaced it now seems deeply entrenched. My parents’ generation all had as their landmark moment where they were and what they were doing when they learned that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. For me and my generation, we all know in stark, vivid detail, what we were doing on the day of September 11, 2001.

    I won’t bore (or re-traumatize) you with the specific sequence of events from my perspective. Suffice to say that it was the most surreal day I’d ever experienced. I still reflect at times on how everyone at school—teachers and fellow students alike—processed what we were seeing. My fourth period math teacher was the only one who refused to deviate from the lesson plan that day, as though any of us could bring ourselves to listen to or care about trigonometry while an unthinkable tragedy was unfolding.

    There were overreactions, of course. Some students were confident that terrorists would crash a plane into the tallest building in the city I lived in and I had to take comfort in the 99.99% chance that, no, foreign terrorists are probably not preoccupied with Nashville, Tennessee. Just wouldn’t make the same statement as New York and Washington, you know?

    The fact that I can remember a world before 9/11 (and before social media and smartphones) is still one that I often take for granted. I do sometimes find myself socializing with people younger than me who wouldn’t remember that world as well as I do. And, just to hurt my own feelings even more (and perhaps yours as well), I realize that there are people out there now earning Master’s degrees who weren’t even born when it happened!

    The aftermath of it all also gave me the chance to watch the real-time rise of the surveillance state and the swift erosion of personal privacy. The apparatuses installed as a response to those attacks are the same ones now being weaponized (more than before) against anyone the current government dislikes or fears themselves. Again, for many people, this is simply the way the world is and therefore must have always been. But it wasn’t always like this!

    We have so far prevented any additional foreign attack that comes anywhere near this unthinkable tragedy in terms of scale, and for that I’m grateful. I can only imagine how horrific it must have been to live in or near New York City at the time or to have lost someone you knew in the attacks (whether in NYC, Washington, or Flight 93).

    But I also quietly mourn for the world that once was and will likely never be again. I don’t want to be hyper-vigilant against my neighbors. I don’t want to hate people with a different skin color than mine or who speak a different language from me. I don’t want to assume that every stranger has bad intentions for me or hates me because of where I live. And I certainly don’t want to think that just because my country was the victim of this terrible act that it justifies everything they have done in response, either at home or abroad.

    Nearly 3,000 people died in the immediate surprise attacks. Countless more in New York died from health complications arising from the collapse of the Twin Towers. This nation suffered a scar on its psyche that will never heal. (And not just the United States, but many other free nations who lost the illusion of peace, as well.) This nation and the world transformed nearly overnight in response to the very possibility that something like it could happen again. For those people, and for that past world, I weep.

    This should be a solemn day of remembrance, one for reverent reflection and quiet mourning. If you’re reading this, and you’re a member of that younger generation of which I spoke, ask someone older what times were like before our world changed overnight. Please understand that the psychological wounds from this event run DEEP. And then, when you’ve learned something new, think of ways you can improve the world around you, one person at a time (even if that person is you).

    Don’t give in to hate or fear. Don’t allow paranoia to guide your decisions. Don’t despair that there is no hope for humankind or that we can’t ever love or trust our neighbors again. Believe that we can and take those first steps to make it happen.

    Be safe, all of you. Take care of each other. Until next time,

    -Marc

  • The Writing Mood

    I realize that I haven’t done any meaningful writing in about two weeks. This is both a byproduct of and contributing factor to my poor mental health of late. Know this, that the mood to do some writing has come and gone a few times in that span, but I’ve always been busy with other obligations. I’ve also had world-building ideas that were mildly interesting, but not ones that I’m sure are worth pursuing deeply.

    I’ve had a few days where I’ve actually felt quite terrible about myself in general and my abilities as a writer in particular. One example of this phenomenon came when my local writing group came up with an interesting prompt that I tried to use for a flash fiction piece, but I just couldn’t conjure up anything satisfying. Maybe I’m asking too much of the piece or maybe I’m not taking the right approach to the prompt itself. Hard to tell.

    One of the reasons this slump feels so bad is that I’m unemployed, so everything feels bad. But another reason is that I often find myself tying my self-worth to how fervently I follow my passions, which is dangerous, because I rarely feel truly passionate about much of anything, it seems. I wish I could lose myself in intense hyperfocus for days at a time on a project, but that never happens. I’m still not sure I’ve found The Thing™ that neither hell nor high water can keep me from pursuing. (The Person™, yes, just not The Thing™.) For as much as I love fiction writing, it’s hard to do. And sometimes that inherent difficulty just feels like a mountain too high to climb that day.

    I’m continually searching for ways to channel my passion (such as it is) into creative energy. That could be building my own combat tracking tool for D&D or thinking of ways to make a simple woodworking project solve a problem around the house. The feeling of the creative act itself, when finished, brings me joy. I just want to create something that I feel is worth looking upon. (Drawing is not my friend, what with having to look upon the fruits of my unskilled hands and gazing upon the grotesqueries they have wrought.) I keep thinking I’ll find the paradigm that will break me out the shame cycle and stop making self-doubt and hypercriticism the default. Maybe someday I will.

    In the meanwhile, keep being kind to one another. We’re all living life for the first time, so give each other some grace—except fascists. They know exactly what they’re doing and deserve every bad thing coming to them.

    We’ll talk again soon. Bidding you the best in your endeavors,

    -Marc

  • Never Enough Clamps

    Once upon a time, not all that long ago, if we’re being honest, I fancied I might do a woodworking blog that would focus on my meager hobbyist efforts. It was going to be titled “Never Enough Clamps” after the eternal struggle of the same name. I’m not announcing the revival of that idea, but I did have the chance to do some woodworking today and it got me thinking.

    Specifically, I spent some time at the local chapter of the Men’s Shed and got the chance to work on some tables bound for donation to a furniture bank. I was able to try out some tools I’d never handled in action before, and I don’t mind telling you that I did so quite inexpertly. BUT! That’s all part of the learning process, isn’t it? As I was meticulously filling in some gaps with plastic wood, I was reminding myself to embrace the process.

    The drafting stage of my novel is also a process, one that doesn’t get done in a day or two. I’m even rethinking a change I made to my main character’s motivations from the first draft, considering reverting back to what it originally was. It feels daunting in its way, but I’m willing to put in the effort if makes for a more believable character.

    I’m also at a point where I want the characters to have some moments between themselves, but I’m trying to be mindful of the pacing. I hadn’t appreciated in earlier drafts how often I slowed things down during the narrative and I’ve been trying to trim the fat. I just need to be mindful that I don’t take out all the quiet moments.

    Beyond that, my unemployed status persists, but so do I! I’m working on improving myself and I’ll root on anyone else doing the same.

    Until next time,

    -Marc

  • On Setbacks

    I apologize in advance for these scattershot thoughts.

    In just a few days, I will officially be between jobs. It’s not something I envisioned for my career, but I have to move forward as best I can. For all my earlier talk of resolve, it either failed me when I needed it or else it just wasn’t enough to overcome the broader situation. It will be easy to think it was the first one, and to give up accordingly. But like I said, I have to move forward. As GLaDOS once said (or sang), “We do what we must because we can.” And so, I must find a new way to trade my time and skills for money within the framework of a capitalist society. And I need to do it especially quickly because that very capitalism acts as a gatekeeper to healthcare in this ass-backward country. We could have nice things, but NO! We had to listen to Adam Smith’s colonizer nonsense from the 18th Century and never, ever question if there was a better way to do things.

    It’s probably going to take some time and energy away from the second draft of my novel. If nothing else, it will feel harder to write creatively when I feel the burden of needing to find suitable employment looming over my head. Justified or not, that obstacle is going to be there and trying to shove it away probably won’t work very well.

    Speaking of novels, my writing group has started to give some feedback on the first few chapters of mine. It’s good to see things that others are able to observe when they haven’t been living with the story bouncing around in their head for a decade.

    Nevertheless, there is a part of me that thinks I should be cooking up some smaller writing ideas on the side. That’s not happening, though, which is irritating. I’m not entirely sure if I should actually indulge the urge to work on any side projects, and that uncertainty is its own brand of frustrating. Should I be working on more than just my novel? If so, what? Why can’t I think of anything? (Of course, the employment situation is also an unwelcome major distraction, too.)

    Some priorities are about to shift—partly because they’re being compelled to and partly because it’s the only thing that would produce the desired results anyway, external factors notwithstanding. I have in my mind a vision of what those priorities are and what it looks like when they are elevated. Now will come the test of whether or not I can actually execute that vision. In a nutshell, I just need to do better.

    I do enjoy writing, though. In fact, I think I’ve enjoyed it more these past few months than I have in a long, long time. I hope I don’t lose that momentum or that fire. I’ve seen what happens when my enthusiasm for something almost completely evaporates and if that happened to my fiction work, I’d be pretty devastated.

    To anyone reading, thanks for letting me bend your ear (as it were) as long as I have. I promise not all my updates will be this moody.

    Only tangentially related to that last paragraph, I did a Corporeal Writing prompt that asked about living “completely openly” and what it would be like to “live without walls.” It got me thinking of the walls I’ve built up in my mind to defend my ego (feelings) and how those walls have counterproductively kept me from growing. Yet to break down those walls would also mean to make myself more vulnerable to the outside world, which is not something that appeals to me. The reward? Yes. The risk? Not so much.

    So, this is an attempt at breaking down a little part of one of those many, many walls that have turned my psyche into an ADHD version of the backrooms. That’s right, if I don’t do more to fix myself now, I’ll end up just like Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character. (Whoa, hey, man! Spoilers!)

    To end this on a positive note, here’s to me (and you, and them, and us) getting better! We can do it! As the incomparable bard himself, George Michael, once said (well, sang), “I gotta have faith.”

    Take care of one another. We’re all going through it, even if “it” is different for each of us. Until next time,

    -Marc

  • World Cup Distractions

    As one might intuit from the title, I’ve been generally distracted the last few weeks by the men’s World Cup. Having played soccer in my youth (at the YMCA), I came to be a fan of the sport. It comforts my little ADHD brain to have it on, whether in the background or as a central focus. I don’t think I’m actively rooting against any particular countries in this year’s tournament (maybe a player, but not an entire team), so I should be able to enjoy the results, however they may shake out.

    Other things are distracting me, too, beside the World Cup. As my last post intimated, I’m struggling to juggle the various responsibilities that come with being an adult laboring under capitalism. (Is the World Cup adding to that struggle? Perhaps. It’s a matter for philosophers.)

    All that to say that I haven’t done as much writing lately as I’d like. I think about it quite often, but the act of sitting down and typing things out has been pushed to the side lately. It’s not a good start for my resolution to finish a chapter every two weeks, I admit. Hopefully this public self-examination will help me to refocus on my favorite hobby and not just put a game on to dull my senses for a while.

    And speaking of games, I just replayed the OG Final Fantasy VII in (very early) anticipation of next year’s release of Final Fantasy VII: Revelation. I have full confidence the game is going to kick ass (and also that it will take up what precious little space is left on our PlayStation’s hard drive).

    But while I was playing it, I got to wondering—why isn’t there a Final Fantasy tabletop roleplaying game? It seems like a bit of a no-brainer on its surface. So, I looked into it and discovered that there is, in fact, a Final Fantasy TTRPG. It’s just that it’s a TTRPG version of Final Fantasy XIV, which I’ve never played. (I simply do not have time for an MMO.) It’s also rather expensive, even by TTRPG standards, so that’s a deterrent to looking into it more. Even so, if I could get my hands on a cheaper version of the rulebook, I’d be curious enough to learn more about it.

    I’ve been trying to make more time for reading, with varying degrees of success. I’m concurrently trying to work through The Fifth Season and The Kaiju Preservation Society (two very different books in terms of tone, let me tell you). I wish reading came as naturally to me as it did back in my school days (or even when I had an office job with downtime). The only way I’ll get back into that depth of habit is by doing. I can’t sit around and wish—gotta just crack open those books and read!

    Anyway, thank you for reading through my gripe session. I’ll aim to have a more positive and interesting update in a couple of weeks. For now, I soldier on. I wish you all luck with doing the same.

    Take care of each other. Admit when you need help, then reach out for it. Show grace to one another and do what you can to be better today than you were yesterday. We’ll talk again soon.

    -Marc

  • On Resolve

    A progress update on the second draft of my novel: I’ve finished chapter 6. By my current chapter outline, I only have 19 more to go. Cue the upside-down smiley face emoji.

    The second draft is already at 28k words, so there’s probably not a very good chance that the whole thing will come in under publishers’ preferred upper limit of 120k words. I’m not envisioning a publisher taking a flier on a first-time author with a novel over the standard word count limit. It makes me worried I’ll have to split this book into two, which is a sub-optimal outcome to me.

    But before I can cross that bridge, I first need to get to it. To do that, I have to buckle down and find some resolve. And not just in the sense of making resolutions, though I’m thinking of that, too. Resolutions like:

    • Making a blog post every other week rather than every month
    • Finishing a chapter of my second draft every other week
    • Being more open about my thoughts and feelings with the people in my life
    • Being more committed to duties and responsibilities

    All these things require resolve on my part—resoluteness, having resolve, being resolute. It’s easy for me to say that I’ll do these things, even that I want to do them, but as the saying goes, “Enthusiasm is common; endurance is rare.”

    I have my own set of mental health issues. But outside of those (or, likely, exacerbated by them), I can be very defeatist at times. It makes it very difficult to establish new habits (good habits in particular) when any little setback is interpreted in my mind as complete and utter failure. It’s not a great way to live and I don’t recommend it. If anything, I recommend taking that part of your mind, giving it a name you absolutely cannot respect, and talking back to it with that name.

    For me, I can’t really take a man named Terry seriously (Pratchett and Crews being notable exceptions). So the part of my mind that’s constantly bringing me down, is named Pterry. That’s right—he spells it with a silent P. Look me in the eye and tell me that you can take anything a person named “Pterry” says seriously. You can’t! So when the defeatist part of my mind is the part that’s being the loudest, I can just say, “No one asked you, Pterry!”

    All of this is to say that my inner resolve, after so many, many years of letting Pterry do his thing without interruption, is Not Good™. And I’m in a place now where that has to change, not just if I want to accomplish goals as a writer, but if I want to continue enjoying the blessings I do have.

    I believe it’s possible. And I will be damned if I don’t try with all I’ve got (and maybe more than I thought I had).

    I’ll talk to you again soon and let you know how chapter 7 is coming along.

    -Marc

  • Blog Post Title Never Determined

    My wife and I are watching the original “12 Angry Men” and we’ve had conversations about how it could be remade and with whom. I’m personally of the opinion that it needs to be updated with women in the cast because could you imagine Jane Lynch or Toni Collette matching up against Michael B. Jordan, Tramell Tillman, or Oscar Isaac in a tense, interpersonal drama? Maybe the 2020’s remake of “12 Angry Jurors” is just another example of something that’s too awesome to exist.

    In other non-existent media, I haven’t made much progress on my novel lately. What I have done has been fruitful, at least in my estimation. A couple of scenes got shuffled around and some fat was trimmed while still keeping in some character moments.

    As the first draft was being written, I was doing quite a bit of world-building at the same time. The more I thought of interesting details, the more I wanted to find a way to include them in the narrative. Going back and reviewing them with a (slightly) more critical eye, I can see that some of the details are just narrative bloat.

    I came to the realization that I’ll always know more about my story’s setting than the reader will and I’m under no obligation to share everything I’ve thought of. For one thing, some details just aren’t actually that interesting. For another thing, unless they have an effect on the story, they become clutter or accidental red herrings.

    In the original version of my novel, at the outset of the protagonist’s journey proper, a side character warns him about the hazards of the road, including “jarnmen,” who are crazy, violent, ultranationalist raiders. I removed the only mention of them from the story because it was just that: one mention. They never appear, never affect anything from the background, and honestly, they’re not even active in the same region that the protagonist’s journey goes through.

    But just because I took the mention of them out of the narrative doesn’t mean they’re not still in the world. There’s a long segment in the middle that slows way down because I wanted to show off characters that revealed more about the wider world. That’s one of my “darlings” that I’ll have to “kill,” but the narrative will ultimately be better for it. So, even though the reader will ultimately not get to know Thegn Yngvar “the Old Aurochs” or the dusk elf scholar Melendrath and his attitudes toward the Eyldrmen’s preference for songs over written records, I’ll still know. I’ll know all of it.

    I’ve been thinking of setting a pace of finishing a chapter every couple of weeks. That sounds approachable while still giving me a schedule with tangible goals. I’m going to start with that this week and see how well I manage it.

    I’ll let you all know how I manage this new goal and how my reading goes, too. Please take care of yourselves and each other. We’ll talk again soon.

    -Marc

  • Lucky Sevens

    Greetings! It’s been a while. I’ll confess upfront that this post’s title is misleading. This just happens to be the seventh post on my author blog and I couldn’t think of anything more clever or relevant.

    I’ve barely scratched the visual art itch since I last talked to you all. I did find a bunch of Bob Ross episodes online, so at least there’s that. Life is just busy, you know? Plus, my job is the source of a lot of stress and anxiety for me right now, so it can be difficult to switch into “creative” mode at night. But rather than make excuses, I’ll try this month to make art instead.

    I said that I’ve barely scratched the visual art itch because I’ve been making modest progress on my novel. Among the accomplishments I’ve made (beyond simply hammering out words) was realizing that the first three chapters of my first draft really ought to have been five chapters. Not that I added content, mind you. No, it’s just that I had crammed too much into each chapter and they were also ending in not-at-all the right places. So I broke them up in more sensible spots and happened to end up with five reasonable chapters where once there had been three overstuffed ones. (I can already tell the current chapter I’m redrafting will need to be broken up for much the same reasons.)

    Oh, I also finished another short story, this one not set in Estéa, nor even in the fantasy genre at all. It’s called A Deal Is a Deal and you can read it here. It’s a cozy little story about one man’s long-awaited conversation with Death. Hopefully you enjoy it.

    Changing topics, I’m pretty sure one of the writing groups I belong to has withered and died. So it goes. But the other one that’s been meeting more regularly has actually expanded its schedule from once a month to twice monthly! So, huzzah. It’s the first time I’ve been part of a regular writing group, so this is an exciting development for me.

    I don’t know that I have much else to add at this time. I know that it’s been a while since my last post and I’ve made upwards of half a dozen of you wait too long for not much of an update. The next one will come sooner, I promise.

    Until then, look after one another and always say “no” to fascism in all of its many forms. (Maybe someday I’ll use this space to spill digital ink on my thoughts, as a Christian, of why Christian Nationalism is unequivocally a terrible thing and should be resisted at all costs.)

    -Marc

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