2016 Writing Recap

For better or worse, 2016 is done and gone. For me (like many people, I imagine), it was a year of transition. For the first time in my life, I made all my income from writing and editing. Most of that income, of course, didn't come from book sales but freelance work, but hey, that's still quite an accomplishment.

On a more personal note, my wife and I also learned we're going to be having our first child—so yeah, if that's not transition and change, I don't know what is. The baby is due in May, and it's exciting, a bit terrifying, and most definitely motivating for me to work harder at the writing I do.

A lot of other writing-related stuff happened, too, so here's a quick recap of the noteworthy tidbits, along with my goals for 2017:

Spring Doings

Dreary, rainy weather inspires me to read and write, but I somehow always manage to be more productive in the Spring than in the winter. Seems a little cliche, what with all the spring "rebirth" symbolism and what have you, but there you have it. I'm a busy bee when it comes to writing in the spring.

Here's a quick recap of what's going on.

#NaNoFailMo

Well, I came into the month of November—National Novel Writing Month—hopeful that I would get back on track with my work in progress, a Cli-Fi novel called Remember the Future. I even updated my NaNoWriMo profile, but alas, I never touched the damn manuscript.

I did do a bit of non-fiction writing of my own, and a lot of freelance writing work, but I couldn't seem to carve out the time to work on Remember the Future. I can't help but wonder if part of the problem is that I've lost the initial enthusiasm I had when starting the project. A lot has happened in my life since I last worked on it, and I'm finding that there are other projects I'd much rather be working on. I'm not officially shelving Remember the Future, but I'm close to doing so. I'll give you my final decision in my next post.

In the meantime, the word has slowly been getting out about Souldrifter and reviews are starting to trickle in. I have a few more interviews and guest posts that will be coming out soon, but here's what's dropped so far.

• Goodreads reviews of Souldrifter
• Black Gate excerpt of Souldrifter
• SF Signal guest post on storytelling and finding your voice as a writer
• BooksChatter Dreamwielder excerpt and author Q&A 

-Garrett Calcaterra

Suspended Animation

Since writing my last post on leaving teaching, it has been a weird period for me, a time of limbo where I’ve been busy as hell but don’t have much to show for it. The majority of my time has been sapped up job hunting: sending out resumes, waiting… doing interviews, waiting… doing follow-up interviews, and, of course, more waiting. I’ve passed on one untenable offer already, and am waiting on at least one more offer in the next week, hopefully one that I can live with. As a teacher, I’ve always had to scrape up lousy temporary work for the summers, and as much as that sucked, trying to find a new permanent job is even more grueling and discouraging, mostly because of the waiting and the uncertainty the future holds.

Hot Investment Tip: buy copies
of the original edition while you can
so you can sell them on Ebay in ten
years when they're collector's editions!

It is also a little exciting, though, particularly with the writing projects I have in the hopper, first and foremost being what’s going on with my Dreamwielder series. Souldrifter, the second book in the series, was originally slated to come out this summer, but my publisher, Diversion Books, has decided to release a new edition of Dreamwielder first, with brand new cover art. As much as I love the original cover, I’m excited to have a cover with Makarria on the front. Stay tuned for a cover reveal soon! The re-release of Dreamwielder will push the release of Souldrifter back until the fall, in order to give us more time to get advanced copies to reviewers and do some giveaways, which is all good. The new book is even better than the first and I think readers are going to love it, but they have to know about it first.

In addition to working with my publisher and agent doing all the behind-the-scenes editing and marketing business on the Dreamwielder novels, I’m outlining the third book in the series and back to working on my unrelated cli-fi novel, Remember the Future. My goal is to have a first draft of Remember the Future done by summer’s end and then get to writing the third Dreamwielder book before Souldrifter is released, but no guarantees! That’s the one thing I’ve been reminded of during this period of suspended animation: nothing works out quite the way I expect it to.

-Garrett Calcaterra

Goodbye to Teaching

I'm used to saying goodbye to students come late May every year, but last week was different. I wasn't just saying goodbye to students for the summer, but to teaching altogether. The decision didn't come easily.

My first year teaching, 2002. Songwriting
students and me in the lower right hand corner.

I love teaching, and teaching writing itself forced me to grow into a better writer, a better reader, and an all around better person. On top of that, the colleagues and students I've had over the years are some of my favorite people ever. "Why leave then?" you're probably wondering. Partly, it's because my wife and I are moving, but, sadly, the answer has mostly to do with money. Simply put, I can't afford to be a writing teacher anymore. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them having to do with systematic problems in the administration of higher education, but I don't have any solutions to offer, so I'm not going to complain. What it came down to for me was that after twelve years in the classroom, I've reached my zenith career-wise in academia. I have no PhD and my professional writing credits are in the speculative fiction field, which adds up to being permanently stuck as an adjunct (part-time) instructor, particularly with the trend in higher education of relying even more heavily on adjuncts in recent years.

A going away gift from the Creative Writing
Conservatory at OCSA, 2015.

At times I've felt like a mercenary writing instructor, teaching up to seven classes a term at three different institutions, each considered a part-time job with no benefits, but combined adding up to ludicrous hours not only in the classroom, but also prepping for lectures and grading. Mostly, though, I've enjoyed my time teaching and helping young people find their voices as writers, and if I could keep doing it and create a secure future for my wife and I, I would. Teaching for the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County School of Arts (OCSA), particularly, has been a great experience. Jim Blaylock brought me on in 2002 to teach a songwriting course, which then expanded into teaching a slew of other creative writing courses, including classes on spec-fiction, novel writing, zombies, and comic-book writing. And it was at OCSA that I got to know Tim Powers and met lifelong friends, both in the faculty and among the students. Similarly, although to a lesser extent, teaching at Chapman University has been highly rewarding. The students have always been respectful to me and receptive to my techniques, despite whatever misgivings they might have had about writing coming in. The faculty within the English Department have been great as well.

So what does this mean for me moving forward? It means taking on a full-time day job as a copywriter, which, believe it or not, will be less work than what I've been doing. Granted, it won't be as personally rewarding, but it will open up a lot of time for reading and writing, which I am very excited about. I haven't had much time for pleasure reading the last ten years, so I'm looking forward to getting caught up on current work in the spec-fiction field. Most importantly, with the change I'll be writing like a fiend from now on.

Souldrifter is slated to come out this summer from Diversion Books, and then I'll be working on the third installment in the Dreamwielder Chronicles as well as my standalone cli-fi novel, Remember the Future. After that, who can say? I have a lot of crazy ideas percolating in my brain—it's time to start getting them out!

-Garrett Calcaterra

(Addendum: 5/28/15 5:55PM PST - Several people have asked me offline to comment more on the problems I've experienced as an adjunct. I don't want to single out any of the schools I've worked for, but here are a couple of recent articles from the NY Times that I've found to be pretty spot on: 1) The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much, 2), What's the Point of a Professor.)

A Name Change and a Change of Heart

Last month I submitted the manuscript for the Dreamwielder sequel to my publisher, Diversion Books, and after a bit of discussion we decided to change the title from The Faceless Enemy to something more in line with the title of the first book. The title we came up with is... wait for it... Souldrifter. It's got a nice ring to it, and hopefully it'll be something that captures readers' imaginations.

The tentative release date for Souldrifter is late summer 2015, and the Diversion team, my agent, and I are busily at work on all the little production and promotional aspects that happen before the release of a book. One of those aspects is wrangling up book jacket blurbs, and I'm happy to announce that the first of them is in, from none other than Wendy Wagner. Wendy is author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Skinwalkers, and also an editor extraordinaire with Lightspeed magazine who played a huge role in putting together Women Destroy Fantasy last year. Needless to say, I'm honored and proud Wendy agreed to say something nice about the book. Here's what she had to say:

"Packed with sorcerers, spies, and high-stakes intrigue, Souldrifter is a real page-turner, and Makarria is a teenage heroine who does more than just kick butt: she's smart, powerful, and surprisingly believable for a fourteen-year-old queen. A good read!"

The next bit of news for the book will likely be the cover art. As soon as I get it, I'll be sure to share it.

In other news, I've been doing a good bit of research for other writing projects and the classes I'm teaching, which more often than not tend to overlap. A case in point is the new short story I'm working on, partly inspired by a class I'm teaching—Innovation Inspiration in Speculative Fiction—and partly inspired by

FOGcon, Cli-Fi, and Wattpad

FOGcon has come and gone, and along with it my first appearance on a panel at a SF/F convention. Yay, I’m no longer a virgin! The convention itself was fantastic. It was great to catch up with Tim Powers, one of the guests of honor, and I learned a lot from attending the panels I wasn’t involved in. One panel in particular, “Manic Pixie Angel,” really opened my eyes to the inadvertent sexism and prejudice common in fiction. Seanan McGuire, the other guest of honor, was hilarious and insightful in the discussion. Afterward, I gave a lot of thought to my female characters in Dreamwielder, and was relieved to come away knowing they all stood up as strong characters, independent of the male characters in the story.

Fractured Reality: The Roads to Baldairn Motte

Two summers ago I was a featured reader at the Big Orange Book Festival. I read two excerpts: the opening chapter of my work in progress, Remember the Future, which went over quite well, and then an excerpt from The Roads to Baldairn Motte, which did not go over so well. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but in doing massive revisions with my co-authors over the last couple of months for the new edition of Baldairn Motte from Reputation Books, I learned a lot about the nature of storytelling and the double-edged sword that is multiple vantage points.

Despite having what I’ll call “aggressive prose,” Remember the Future was easy to read aloud and easy for my audience to digest aurally because it is a straight forward narrative. There is one viewpoint character (my protagonist) and the story is completely internalized and colored by his personality. It’s a narrative form readers are used to.

For Your Consideration: Mettlefetchers

As I wrote a while back in an article at Waistcoat & Watch, one of the keys to having a successful career as a writer is creating a large body of work. If you want to make a living as a novelist, you need to have a bunch of books out there for fans to buy and read. I take the idea a step further and really try to diversify my writing, publishing everything from novels and short stories to magazine articles and essays, not to mention writing screenplays to submit to festivals on the long shot some producer will actually want to produce one and write me a fat check (yeah, I know, fat chance). In any case, this usually means I’m juggling multiple projects at any given time, and right now is no exception. In fact, my good friend and frequent collaborator, Ahimsa Kerp, and I have just a launched a new project we’d like to submit for your consideration: Mettlefetchers.

Terrorism, Climate Change, Mass Hysteria – This is Why I Write Spec-Fic

In his personal essay, “Almost California,” Chuck Palahniuk says, “That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version.” As a teacher, I make all my creative non-fiction students read this essay because I think it poignantly defines what autobiographical writing is all about. As a writer, I take this idea a step further and ask myself: why do I write spec-fiction? Hell, why do I write at all?

In the summer of 2010 I worked on a clean-up barge in response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As I wrote here on this blog afterward, it was a highly frustrating experience—my hunch that the clean-up vessels were being chased off so BP could sink the oil into the ocean, thereby avoiding damaging photo ops, turned out to be right on—and I was newly inspired as a writer. In my own words, “I (re)adopted the strategy of trying to write stories with relevance to the real world...”