Coffee With David

Do you ever go with your friends from work to dinner, a coffee house, a bar or somewhere you can just relax and blow off steam? It is a little hard to take your main coworker out “to happy hour” when that coworker is your muse. After all, that coworker is somewhere inside your brain feeding you lines and paragraphs. You can’t amble up to the bar and say “give me a (whatever) and another for my muse” or “hey, my muse is picking up this round.”

However, I have found that I do need off time to hang out with my muse. Obviously, I cannot take it out nor do I run around saying “I am talking to the voices in my head.” Oftentimes I work on puzzle games or imagination exercises. Sometimes I review something I have written or something blocking me from going forward in a casual manner. Other times I may go to a park or a mall and just people watch while I try to guess stranger’s life stories.

It is not the same or as much fun as spending time with a friend, but it does keep the imagination flowing and growing—and the stories coming.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the stories I write.

There is an image of the publishing world that goes something like this: “My book was just accepted by XYZ publishing and they will do all the marketing and promoting so I can write my next book.” While I have not had my first book published yet, I know that this is not reality. From friends who have had books published, I have learned that the author must promote and publicize their novel and work themselves. Lets face reality, the publisher can only do so much. Your work is given only so much of the budget “pie.” The author must be willing to promote their own work.

That is one of the reasons I have blogs dedicated to the novels and short stories I am working on. I am promoting my work, trying to get myself out there and be frequently published. I learned a long time ago that if you do not believe in yourself, if you are not willing to show enthusiasm for your work, then no one else is going to be enthusiastic about it. So, I am going to continue to be enthusiastic, promote and blog away…hope someday you will see my books on the shelf and say “I remember his blogs. I want to read this.”

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the stories I write.

There are days when I will not write. My muse is tired, my mind tries to herd words into sentences as if they were cats, and I finally have to say enough. I want to spend time with friends, do something around the house, go on a date, or even just unwind the stress of my “bill paying” job. Sometimes you have to have non-writing days.

Non-writing days does not mean that my mind has stopped thinking about a story. Actually, it is usually in the background steaming like a kettle on a fire somewhere in the back of my mind. Meanwhile, I will focus my mind on the important moments in life—creating my own life story. I may read, go camping, ski, or whatever. If I do not live life, how can I create fiction?

Thank you for reading. Please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information about the stories I am working on.

Over the past few weeks I have been reworking my writing schedule to try to bring the most out of me. Will I ever get it right? Maybe . . .someday . . .probably not. It is a balancing act of in the eternal struggle for the balance of power between the artisan and disciplinarian. One of the first casualties in this war for power is the writing schedule and the deadlines that cling to it for life. The disciplinarian in me wants a certain number of stories or pages in a novel done by a certain time. The artisan in me wants to produce quality art, not simple hackneyed pieces that a dodo bird could have created while deciding what to have for breakfast.

Nailing artistic expression to a schedule is just a little easier than trying to hang Jell-O on a nail. To achieve progress, there has to be a constant balance between the artisan, disciplinarian, personal life, and bill paying work life (for those of us who can only write part time). To find this balance, I have found it necessary to not think of my self-imposed deadlines or schedules as chiseled in stone, but to be written in moldable and flexible clay. They are there, they can be adjusted, but they still have to be met. By doing this, both parts of myself are happy and I can be nimble to the changes in the world around me.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for up to date information and blogs.

I truly believe that people with ADHD are the greatest multi-taskers in the world, if we have learned how to use it. However, it can draw me away from the purpose of the story I am writing. Sometimes, it feels like a horse that wants to wander off the trail of thought and wants to explore other stories. I have decided that I am tired of fighting my desire to work on more than one genre and one story at once. Instead, I am exploring a new tactic to battle the ADHD and be successful as a writer. What am I doing?

Well, I would be foolish if I let the ADHD have its freedom completely. I am focusing each day onto a separate area and genre of writing. It may slow me down in comparison to “normal” writers, if there is such a breed. Yet, we shall see the results with the stories I get published and the work I do. Follow along on my website and lets see if it is successful or a bust.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on what I am writing and other news.

First, I would like to share an update: I have just submitted a new short story, “The Last Friend,” for publication. Let us see what happens.

Why do I get out of bed after so few hours of sleep to write? Why leave the warmth of my blankets and comforter, disturb my cat who has claimed my legs or stomach to be his bed? Why start the coffee and working when others are sleeping or barely managing to open the morning paper? Why do I rush every meal to finish so I can run to my laptop and await the pain of carpal tunnel to set in one day? Why bother to wrestle with my SLD in written expression?

Obviously, it is not to be rich or famous, so few of us writers ever see that level of success. To be rich or successful, to spend less hours working so hard, I could have been a lawyer, a doctor, or pursued some other profession. Let me be clear—doctors and lawyers (the good ones anyway) work themselves hard and suffer long hours—writers just work longer for less money. Most lawyers and doctors are lacking one thing that writers must wrestle with: that flaky, unreliable, task master known as our muse.

I do not get out of bed because the alarm clock goes off. I get out of bed because my muse has put on a military uniform with three chevrons and three rockers, wearing a “Smokey the Bear” hat and is screaming in my ear to get out of my rack or hit the floor and give him fifty pushups. It is the story my muse is pouring through my mind that creates that annoying itch that can not be scratched until the ink is on paper.

Let me not kid you, if this sounds so harsh and so cruel, there is a pleasure that flows from it as well. I may push myself to hard at times, but the results bring a satisfaction I cannot feel in other things. It is the words I hear from people I know or strangers I met who have read my blogs, heard my stories, or have seen me write “that touched me,” or “ you inspire me to reach for my goals” that truly keeps me pouring ink on paper.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on what I am writing and other news.

I was asked where I get my ideas from. The easy answer is everywhere. It is true as I get ideas from phrases I hear, stories I read, people I meet, or even songs I listen to. It is a quick answer, but it is less than descriptive. Ideas do not just come at me like cosmic rays from the sky. The truth be told, my creativity is as water that flows from my fountainhead, which binds the chaos into the stream of story. I use the term fountainhead in reference to the philosophy of novelist, screen writer, playwright, and philosopher Ann Rand.

Ann Rand once said “man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.” While it can easily be said that she may have referred to the inflated sense of self-worth that can be seen in many of the artistic, architectural, scientific, and other developments of mankind, it is not what she was referring to, that is neither the reference of ego that Rand nor I refer to.
The term ego that we refer to was first called “das ich” by the man who created its scientific philosophy—Dr. Sigmund Freud. The ego we refer to is the ego of the psychoanalysis model of id, ego, and super-ego. Freud wrote, “The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces.” [Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923)]
My creativity flows from my id, searching for an idea, a purpose and reason to flow. Unbound, unharnessed it would flow without direction or form, flooding the world around me with nonsense and ranting. Instead, to be more than mere fancy or pleasure, it is harnessed, the pressure build and shoots out the spouts of my fountainhead, for the purpose of the story it will tell.
Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on what I am writing and other news.

“Sometimes you have to roll a hard 6,” is a poplar phrase in the re-imagined version of Battlestar Galactica. What does it mean? It means, sometimes you have to lay it all on the line—push yourself and your luck to the limit to achieve what you need to despite the odds. In my case, it is time to lay it on the line and take a gamble.

Over the last few weeks I have been studying my writing habit. My study has been more introspection than scientific, as I take who I am and what I write, probe it and ask if I am really developing myself as a writer like I want . Upon my conclusion, I have decided to adopt a philosophy to use my attention deficit/hyper active disorder to my advantage and take a page from my martial arts instructors—applying it to my writing.

I may have lost my mind, let sanity slip the leash and run off into the fog. Yet I have found myself quagmire in concepts and ideas—and banging my head on forcing out the fiction to try to close one story so I can move on to another genre I write.

As I grew as a martial artist in my belt ranks, my instructor would spend each lesson working on two or three things: kata (or forms), self-defense techniques, and/or sparring. It kept the lesson going, kept boredom at bay, and kept me growing and pushing myself. So, I take this concept and apply it to my writing as of this week.

Here’s how:
Everyday will have time dedicated to rewriting a blog and a short story or novel.
While I will still post my blogs on a daily basis, I will write all of the week’s rough drafts on Mondays.
Tuesday will now be dedicated to developing and writing horror short stories;
Wednesdays are dedicated to exploring science fiction short stories;
Thursdays will become crime drama short story days;
Fridays are now Fantasy Fridays for fantasy short stories;
Saturdays will be dedicated to writing the Novel Dark Medicine until the rough draft is done; and
Sundays will be dedicated to writing a new novel. This new novel is a science fiction titled “The Guardians.” There is a new blog on it that will be updated on Sundays along with the blog for Dark Medicine.

This may slow my writing down. I don’t think so, but it is the risk I am taking. The goal of it is to keep my art expanding, the writer in me hopping, avoid complacency, and to get out at least one short story a month in each genre. Time will tell if this gamble works, but I will be the one who defines its success.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on what I am writing and other news.

Erle Stanley Gardner (author of Perry Mason, among a wide range of other mysteries) once said that sleeping was a habit. He would only sleep when he had to. This was not just the statement of an author who wrote for a living, but of a man who was also was a practicing attorney. He held two professions at one time, just like most of us writers.

I joke about my schedule and all the projects and events going on by saying, “I burn the candle at both ends and in the middle.” Personally I run on 4 to 6 hours of sleep each night. This week, I think I have turned those flames into a blowtorch . As a result, my body just crashes. This week has been a week of that for me. There are a lot of projects at my “bill paying job” that have been slowly bleeding energy away. While I would like to make writing my number one priority, paying the bills is number one. I have not been writing at night like I should.

However, not all is sadness. By this weekend I will back to running full steam and back to work on the short stories and novels I am working on. If my blog entries are a little sporadic, you will know why.

To give you a sneak peek, tomorrow and Saturday’s entries will be on two questions I have been asked recently:
What motivates me to write?
Where do you get your ideas from?

Thank you fro reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com.

You may have seen this on my Facebook page or in any of the Facebook groups I belong to. I have been running with a concept for an upcoming horror short story, but I have hit a brick wall on my research. Here is the request I posted:

“I am trying to research the ancient Egyptian concept of the 4 aspects of the soul, especially the Sheut. All I have been able to find are short descriptions, similar to this from wikipedia: ‘A person's shadow, Sheut (šwt in Egyptian), was always present. It was believed that a person could not exist without a shadow, nor a shadow without a person, therefore, Egyptians surmised that a shadow contained something of the person it represents. For this reason statues of people and deities were sometimes referred to as their shadows.

The shadow was represented graphically as a small human figure painted completely black as well, as a figure of death, or servant of Anubis.’

Is there any websites or books (in English) that goes into more details about the Sheut and its relationship to the person and the soul. I am looking for any myth or details on it?”

Thank you in advance and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information.

Have you ever seen a writer write? If you have seen me, it is probably in some coffee house or that the public library with my fingers pounding on the keyboard to a laptop or my eyes are staring off in to the ether trying to imagine the scene I am writing. You may pass me by and think “that’s all he does , sit there and type?” You see me writing, but you missed the most important stage—the living research.

Someone once said that a writer is simply a chronicler of the times he or she lives in. I beg to differ. A chronicler implies that all we do is stand by like dispassionate scientists writing our observations on the page. While writing can be a solitary activity during the actual physical typing of the story, our works permeate from our experiences, our views and those of the people around us. All literature is meant to be a magical looking glass through which we reflect the world around us back at the reader. We may overtly or covertly put the social issues (such as corruption, the environment, decimation, education, intolerance, and more ) our cultures face into the story.

As an American writer, I am spoiled by our right to free speech under our Constitution. Sadly, there are “brothers and sisters” of us writers who try to produce their work under strong censorship with brutal consequences. Yet, it is writers (be it fiction authors, poets, lyrists, journalist, or non-fiction authors) that slash open the challenges our cultures face and leave it unapologetically naked for the world to see. Some of us only create mild ripples in the pond. Other (like Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell, and others) see were society is headed and try to warn of what may happen. Some (like Charles W. Chestnut, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo) show the world the dichotomy of their cultures. Others beg us to never forget (such as Herman Wouk with The Winds of War and War and Remembrance , Lois Lowry with Number the Stars, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee). Still others try to steer change in society and our institutions (such as Sinclair Lewis with The Jungle or Harriet Beecher Stowe with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”).

We are more than chroniclers of the world around us. With sleeves rolled up and our fingers poised on the keyboard we write to entertain, to inform, to enrich, and to change.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the stories I am currently working on.

Last weekend I spent several hours listening to Paul Guyot at the St. Louis Writers Guild Workshop. Who is he? He has “twenty years’ experience working in Hollywood, the last decade writing and producing television. Prior to moving to St. Louis, Paul was an award-winning writer and producer for the CBS drama Judging Amy, as well as several other television shows he’d rather not mention. Since the move, he has created and executive-produced television pilots for TNT, Warner Brothers, Fox, Sony, Lions Gate, and ABC Studios. Currently, Paul has a deal with Fox Studios, and he is the creator and executive producer of Crimes Against Persons, a pilot for A&E to be filmed in St. Louis.” (Saint Louis Writers Guild spotlight)

One of the anecdotes that Paul shared made me think about my time in High School, College and everywhere I have turned to learn my craft. He told a story about how an “A student” graduate from a university (I am leaving the name out) had shared a script that the student had written. This graduate had spent at least four years at this university learning how to write screenplays for Hollywood. What Paul said next only could make me agree in reflection on some of the classes I have taken along the way to where I am now. He said that he talked with the graduate and told him that the formatting and method of the screenplay was all wrong. The graduate shared with Paul that he had been afraid that was the case and went on to explain that this method he used was what his university had taught everyone to use.

As I listened to this story, I thought about everything I have read and learned in creative writing classes all of my life. Like any other aspiring writer, I took all the creative writing courses I could while in school. I never stopped to think to ask: “How much have you published and where have you published it?” “After all, the school hired them. They should know what they are talking about. They are the teacher.”

I am not saying I have had horrible creative writing teachers. I had some good ones and some great ones. What I realized later in life is that I should not have been a sponge soaking up their knowledge and taking it as gospel—and this goes for all the advice in books on writing and in writing magazines. What I have learned and continue to improve upon is shifting through all of the advice and instruction for what the truth to our art is.

There is a line in one of the Star Wars movies that goes “You must unlearn what you have learned.” Sometimes I am not sure what the “truth of our art is,” but I have learned what it is not:

1. It is not formula;
2. A story is not a simple recipe that you can throw together as a simple soup
3. You cannot submit things in a format that the publisher would not accept and expect to be published;
4. You cannot send a piece to a publisher who would not publish that kind of story;
5. What the academic publishing world wants is not the same as what the commercial publishing world wants;
6. You cannot submit something, have it be accepted to be published, and expect that the publisher will do all of the work marketing it;
7. You cannot expect a magazine or book editor to edit your work and catch your mistakes.

There are hundreds more things I have learned and even more that I need to unlearn. One of the things I have learned is to take everything I learn with “a grain of salt.”

Thanks for reading. Please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on the stories I write.

It is amazing how many people will say “I am going to write a book and get rich, and then I can sit around all day.” The idea of writing a story as a way to get rich fast scheme is often the dream of someone who has not really tried to write or get their stories published. They do not know the hours of work that goes into it and realize that most writers would barely make minimum wage if what they earn was expensed across all the hours of thinking, plotting, writing, and editing.

Why write? There is a richness that comes with writing well. It is not in the clink of coins or rub of money. The gold standard that a writer has to measure his or richness is in the expression of those who read or hear the story. The riches come from the words of “wow, that was great” or “I really liked that story.” The dividend is invested in the “that story made me feel” and in the “that character touched me.”

All writers want to make money and a living on the art we produce. What we make sometimes will not pay the bills, so we work elsewhere. We continue to produce because of the richness that comes from writing, not because we will likely become rich from doing it.

Please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for the latest information on the stories I write.

The Holidays are over and I can return to the blog posting schedule. Many blogs I have seen posted the “best” or “worse” of 2008. I am going to break with that tradition and stand as though I were on an old tall ship at the bow, letting the air of adventure and the salt waves of 2009 spray me. I wrote in a previous post what my writing production plan is for 2009. It is ambitious to say the least, and to be completely honest I do not expect everything to publish. I would be surprised if half ever was published. Yet, if I let this knowledge weigh on my mind then I will never take the risk. I will not have the enthusiasm or the imagination needed to get even one story published—especially in this hard economy where many of the publishers are looking at cutting staff, amount that is published, or even deciding to leave the business.

Instead, I look upon each story is an adventure and a step on this journey I have undertaken. If I am worried about measuring success, then I shall look upon this as we do baseball. If someone can swing the bat in an American Baseball game, fail to reach the treasured goal of being on base 60 to 70% of the time, and still be called great, then I too shall use the same measuring stick. I am going step up to the plate, swing with all I can, accept the fact that I will not make every story sell, and celebrate the ones that do.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com