I'm a huge believer that there is no such thing as writer's block. Any sort of delay or difficulty, whatever name you give it, is only fear in some shape or other.

A smart writer -- meaning one who is dedicated to the craft, who is open to criticism and who considers himself a perpetual student --  must develop a blind trust in the powers of the calm brain. Any task that is set before us will always seem more difficult to some degree when we think about it away from pen or keyboard. Conversely, any challenge we face will always become easier during the act of writing.

At midnight yesterday, I received my prompt for Round 2 of the NYC Midnight contest about which I've been blogging for the last couple months: Drama / A Pier / A putter (a golf club). As is my normal procedure, I laced up my walking shoes and pounded the pavement, confident the juices would flow and deliver me a terrific start to a story.  An hour and a half later, I had ideas but not the one, good, big idea I needed to get started with confidence. At least that seed wasn't waving its hand to be recognized.

No one likes walking into the dark unfamiliar and I am no exception -- of course, ironically, I do walk late at night on familiar streets, as I've mentioned. I headed to the local coffee shop this morning with nothing more than crumbs in my virtual bag when what I wanted, felt I needed, was a whole muffin of a story idea. So what did I do?

I opened up Pages (Mac word processor) and I wrote. That's it. I wrote. I got my character stoned between the fifth and sixth holes on a disk golf course and turned the screws on him. That's what he gets for hiding, right? There's something about vomiting ideas into some visual form. Write it. Type it. As long as your fingers are engaged, you're on the right path. Yes, you'll be crapping crappy crap for a while, but something magical happens if you just let go. And thinking is for the birds. Some amount of it is necessary. I did some nasty thinking when the prompt came in. Confession: I didn't know exactly what made drama...drama. I searched for good definitions and examples so my mind would know where to go to dream, but that was pretty much the extent of it.

So consider this my trademarked writing law:

Writing success is directly proportional to the degree of activity in our fingers and the degree of stillness in our mind.

Said in a way that fits nicely onto a bumper sticker:

It all comes out in the writing.

Reading all of this, you might think I'm contradicting things I've written about writing in previous posts, that I sound like I'm writing by the seat of my pants. I guess that does require some clarification.

First off, I don't argue against seat of the pants writing. Nor do I argue against careful planning. But if you're facing a situation where you must sit and write, I'm arguing that you can ALWAYS do it. There is no wasted time and there is no wrong direction (provided you know the basic definitions required for the task at hand, such as my need to have the elements of drama better defined).

Especially for longer works, careful planning is necessary. It has been said that short stories, moreso than novel-length works, require it. Flash pieces -- especially flash pieces with a two-day deadline --  calls for a different process. But even in the careful planning stages I mention, there is a temptation to rub our foreheads, to dawdle and tell ourselves we're anguishing, squeezing out the good stuff.

Trust me when I say the good stuff only shows up when you're recording actual words, be they story, outline, synopsis or notes.

Woo hoo! My story based on the prompt fantasy/wating room/lobster won 3rd place in Round 1.5 of the NYC Midnight 2009 Creative Flash Fiction Writing Championship. I guess the judges weren't turned off by a single-minded farting dwarf. This bodes well for my future in the competition.

In unconfusing terms, Round 1 is comprised of two stories. We wrote the first in June and the second in July. We earn points depending upon our placement in our 15-person groups. I received 22 points for the first story so I'm sitting on 20 points. That means I'm leading my group!

All but the bottom five writers in each of the 16 groups move on to Round 2, writing the 3rd story, tonight. We'll have until one minute before midnight tonight until one minute before midnight on Sunday, 2 days to write a 1000-word short story. It's a challenge to be sure.

Since I'm someone who needs to think of data in all sorts of ways to understand it I came up with the following:

I'm going into the 2nd round in 23rd place out of a starting group of approximately 240. Percentage-wise that puts me in the top 9-10%, an A minus. With only the top 10 in each group moving on, we'll be down to 160 writers. My 23rd place drops me from an A minus to a middle B. Voila! There's my motivation. I'm not even doing anything and I have to study harder to keep up. This is the sort of thing I respond to: deadlines and dynamic odds.

Cross your fingers for me. I'm hoping for a good genre, setting and object (our prompt). Regardless, I'll take my long meditative walk and let the rhythm of my steps bring a story idea to me.

One of my life-long friends -- who will remain unnamed -- runs one of the most successful Second Life real estate companies. Earlier this year, he asked me to brand VirtualWorldi with a srong logo that would communicate to Second LIfe users and would read at different sizes and resolutions. 

I was please to learn from him today that his first ad is up and running. Whether or not you are a participant in Second Life, I think you'll find the ad both professional and striking. Not being a participant myself, I find the whole thing fascinating and surreal.

Enjoy the ad and pay specail attention to the logo at the end. Pause it and digest it. Kidding, of course, but I'm proud of it. Apparently, the logo appears in a number of place in Second Life that I haven't seen.

To contact VirtualWorldi you can:

• IM Phobos Jamberoo
• or visit them at www.virtualworldi.com

As much as I'd love to say it's not a numbers game, I admit it is largely that. A poor fisherman will catch more fish that an excellent fisherman who never goes near the water. If you never ask the pretty girl to the dance, she won't know you wanted to go. Wayne Gretzky once said, when criticized about the number of off-target shots he had taken over a span of play, and I paraphrase, "We miss 100% of the shots we do not take."

The same is true with submitting stories. If you don't submit, you can't get published. Simple as that. The more you submit the more chances you have to get rejected, true, but you also increase your chances of getting a piece accepted.

If you've ever heard the saying "There's someone for everyone" then you understand that eventually, even poor work gets accepted by someone. If this is true for the crappiest writers among us, then shouldn't the best among us have a far easier time?

Yes and no. It's better, but not simple. Some poor work eventually gets accepted, but some excellent work gets rejected too. In fact, a ton of it does. I won't steal the figures I've read about some of history's greatest authors beginning their careers with thousands of rejections, but it's true and dreadful and inspiring at once.

So what do we do with this knowledge? Mope? Celebrate? No. You submit. Then you submit again...and again. I say this bravely now, but I'm guilty of not submitting often. I have not enjoyed the process so far but I have turned a corner, have kicked myself in the pants and have been submitting at least once a day.

I used to play D & D and other role-playing games before computers could keep track of all the stats for you. That meant a shit-load of dice rolls. 4-sided, six-sided, eight-, ten-, twelve and twenty-sided dice. Over and over for every imaginable reason. I've seen every roll. Once I faced an overwhelming single character, a hero, who could have easily wiped out every one of my 2000-man army and proceeded to kill me, their docile king. For giggles, I asked the Dungeon Master (just as nerdy-sounding now as then) if I could attempt to kill the hero with a single catapult shot. The Dungeon Master -- we'll call him Tracy -- scratched his chin and murmured, "Nothing is impossible. You'd have to roll a 100." For those of you who are unfamiliar with what that means, "rolling a 100" meant rolling a 0 on each of two 20-sided dice: a 1% chance of hitting the hero. I rolled two zeros. I hit the hero. I did a backflip, so great was my joy. Then I had to roll for damage. Another zero would mean the hero was killed outright. I rolled a zero. I ran around the room Roger Rabbit-style for a minute while my sobbing opponent curse me, the dungeon master and the gods in general.

You see? I had the gall to ask. That alone allowed for the ridiculous luck to occur. Let's apply that to a submission.

You have a story about dog who has died and battles evil in the afterlife. It's well-written but, you fear an unsellably oblique idea for a story. What you don't/didn't know is publication/agent A has just lost a dog to an unfortunate popsicle accident. You ponder your options. You can bury the story in a stack or you can take the leap and submit it. Now you've unleashed yourself in two parallel universes. You #1 has a crazy story in a stack and no one gets hurt. You #2 however, has enjoyed a summertime popsicle so when you lick the envelope (supposing you're not submitting electronically) you leave a tint of blue sugar on the seal. A day or two later, the depressed recipient nears the end of his/her work day but sees a blue streak on the back of the top envelope that, somehow, has landed upside down. He/she opens the envelope to read about the heroic dead dog. It's a perfect healing fit. Voila, you're published. You #2 receives a publishing credit and a $10 check which he uses to buy a pair of 20-sided dice like he used to kill a hero a long time ago.

Bottom line: submit. The more you do the easier the roll.

Another added benefit of submitting your work is that doing so forces an author to face reality. Once I finish a story, I generally feel a flush of pride. Another story complete. I could place it on a stack and think of it forever after as a special accomplishment. Or I could plan to show it at critique. That shines a light on the work and forces the author to take a closer look. After all, real people are going to read it and judge me to some degree for its weaknesses and strengths. The next level is submission. This is the world looking at your story. You're not simply getting the work ready for colleagues; this is the world. Knowing the story is going in front of a stranger who will be being scrutinizing your work for its fitness to be shown to potentially thousands of viewers forces an author to make the story as perfect as possible. Knowing this is the end goal for the story only helps the author's craft.

So by submitting, you improve your craft and increase your chances for adding items to your resume. In my mind, that qualifies as a win-win.

Thank the Lord (or whatever) for coffee houses. 

Today, I'm sitting with my older boy, Addison. We're at a coffee house. This last weekend, Nadine (my lovely wife) and I hung out at our favorite place, the local bookstore. Where did we sit to look through our prospective purchases? A coffee house. My younger son, Ian, and i sat in a coffee house toward the end of the school year last Spring and made up weird, funny alternate rules to the classic card game, War. The day after, he shared with his teacher how much fun he had had on our "date."

I've spent hundreds of hours in coffee house during my return to writing. The places feel like familiar rooms in my house, if not members of my family. I'm curious to see how I'll think about coffee houses when I'm older, looking back on my life.

The standouts coffee houses have been Cafeggio's, Olmos Cafe, La Taza and, shamefully, various Starbucks locations around San Antonio. Like Microsoft, Starbucks can't be avoided.

Cafeggio's in the Stone Oak area of San Antonio. It was a terrific, independent coffee house about a mile from home. And I say "was" because Addison and I drove by it today and it, finally, has failed. You see, though it was a great place at first -- great help, great coffee, great seating and atmosphere (if a little to bright for glossy screens at certain times of the day) -- once it was sold by the original owners, the shine went away. The coffee was good, but they moved the furniture around. Overnight, there wasn't a single comfortable place to plug in a laptop. And you couldn't tell the management because no one spoke English better than a tourist. Then again, when the second people sold it, it got even worse. The one saving grace, the coffee, became undrinkable with the third group of mutated owners. What were they thinking.  It was bitter-sweet to see the place close, but, given the horrid quality of the place at the end, its failure was inevitable. Regardless, Cafeggio's will always be closer to my heart than any other coffee house in San Antonio, and perhaps any coffee house period, because it was the one where I got my start on my serious phase of writing.

Next is Olmos Cafe, another fine coffee shop in the Olmos area of San Antonio. I'm certain Olmos Cafe would have been my favorite coffee house were it not a 20-minute drive away. Hands down, Olmos Cafe has the best interior design, music selection, artistic and tasteful drinks and best baked snacks of any coffee house I've visited in San Antonio. It is a modern, masculine, peaceful space with comfortable couches, traditional tables and cubicle-line booths for more concentrated laptop work.

My favorite current go-to coffee house is La Taza at Brook Hollow and 281 North. It's may bring to mind a country breakfast-oriented restaurant with its too bright interior and nowhere-close-to-modern furniture, but there's a great, living room vibe I haven't found before in a city setting. In fact, La Taza reminds me of Buffalo River Coffee House in Hohenwald, Tennessee, which looks exactly like you'd expect a coffee house 30-minutes away from other civilization to look.

And Starbucks. You can't avoid them. You've all seen them. They are the McDonald's of coffee houses: predictable, acceptable drinks and snacks, safe music, generic furniture, neurotic staff (did I say that?). It's the rest stop on a long trip. You know they'll be there on your way if you can just hold it long enough, but they're not the best place you've ever stopped.

And now I'm finishing up this blog. It's 9pm and I don't feel remotely like going to bed. It's the coffee. I guess it's not a total loss though. I get to think about the conversation and the quiet Addison and I spent at yet another coffee house today.

At the San Antonio Writers Guild August meeting last night, Chris Roberson spoke about his personal writing process as contrasted against those of other writers. His presentation, given in a casual conversational style, was titled "Everyone Else Is Crazy: Finding the Process that Fits".

Chris admitted he was in fact the person who was just as likely to be crazy. His point was that every other writer's system or method or process appears crazy to other writers. No two writers have the same process, much as no two people have the same signature or surf the web in the same way. And that's a good thing.

What's important is we learn what other successful writers do, take what we can use and throw the rest out. This advice is very much like that given in 12-step programs...not that I would know ;-)

Chris's process is basically this:

He jots any and every notable idea in small Moleskin notebooks he takes everywhere with him.

After a time, stewing on a number of different story ideas, he'll walk through these small notebooks and pop the related ideas into a different style, slightly larger, notebook. In these, he'll record his 2-sided "conversation" with himself in an effort to shake ideas from the bushes.

The third and longest step is outlining. We're not talking high school outlines. We're not talking college outlines. We're talking full doctorate-level outline where, in the case of short stories, every detail of every paragraph is defined. This step can take anywhere from 2-3 weeks, depending upon the length of the work. I found it curious that his short story outlines tend to be nearly as long as the finished work whereas his novel outlines will be closer to 20% of the novel's finished length. He outlines his novel's chapter detail as opposed to individual paragraphs. Doing otherwise might tip the balance and have men in white coats looking for him.

Finally, once he has nailed down the outline with 100% certainty, only then does he do the actual writing. Having the road cleared of any second-guessing or mid-stream modification, he is free to attack his writing with what for many of us is unthinkable speed: 10k words in a day is not uncommon. 

What at first sounds like madness became perfectly clear to me as I sat listening to him. The fact that he has done the difficult groundwork beforehand, all the plotting and massaging, allows him to write the entire story or novel in the same mind.

Talk about an a-ha moment. 

One of the major difficulties I've had in writing longer pieces has been, as a beginning writing my words tend to sound different by the end of the story than they did at the beginning. I attribute this to a two things.

First, when I begin a story, writing by the seat of my pants, I know the story in a fresh, undiscovered way. By the end of the story, I know it far better so the mood has changed. I can see a positive aspect of writing this way: transformation in the author, transformation in the characters and action. The problem is, I'm out of my comfort zone. As a designer, I find it necessary to have all my ducks in a row before I start on a design because I have to get pretty close the first time since I'm working with other people's money.

Second, my writing is constantly improving so when I write a story over a few months time, I'm at a different, noticeable skill level from the beginning to the end. Try as I might, I can't find the benefit to this problem.

So a big thank you to Chris Roberson for sharing his process and for having a process adequately odd for me to simulate in my next work. I'll let you know how it goes.

Click here to visit Chris at his site Roberson's Interminable Ramble.

Double-Take (formerly Now You See Him) is ready for critique. My group liked a lot about this short story when I showed the first half to them a month ago.

The story starts with Branton (Mr.) Salley in a mad rush along the busy New York City streets, late for a very important meeting. He meets up (quite solidly) with a familiar face but doesn't connect the dots until he has already passed. Some things never change.

Now, with the first part of the story massaged and the second half in their hands, I'm eager to hear what my peers have to say.

I've really found a terrific solution for writers block. It seems no matter how tired or brain-dead I feel, I can always imagine one of my stock characters, William Waiklin, Branton Salley, Hilmer Gibb or Frances Klik, doing something interesting to write about. If you have a troupe, I suggest you draw on them when times get tough, when you're staring at the screen and thinking....nothing.

My last three stories that have gone before critique have shared one similar shortcoming: crappy use of narrative summary. I've read a lot about writing and I'm sure I have read about narrative summary along the way, but the way my mind works, I had forgotten what it was and how or if it should be used.

I looked around the Internet and came across this wonderful article "How Interesting is your Narrative Summary?" that explains how to use narrative summary effectively in your writing. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, I invite you to read the teaser that follows and click the 'read more' link after it.

So the verdict, as far as I can tell is this: narrative summary, like any other element of fiction that some would throw out without exception -- there is a current Stephen King-driven war on adverbs -- is a powerful tool. And like any tool, it must be used correctly. You can tighten the nut or you can bludgeon the homeowners.