Focusing on writing after a long day can be hard, if not impossible.  Despite the difficulties, it's often the only time I have, so I force myself to try to write.

I've stared at the screen for hours, accomplishing nothing.  I've tried typing out any random thought in my head, hoping that the literal motions will be enough to get my thoughts aligned.  I've even tried meditation or, conversely, distraction.  The success rate with any of those are always pretty low; I'd say there was a one-in-four chance I'd get into a groove.

Of course, music helps a lot of people, myself included.  I have a handful of different playlists to help me get in the mood, but they are as unreliable as anything else.  Music seems better suited for keeping focus, then attaining it.

There is, however, one combination I've found to work about half the time: A pair of good (expensive) noise-canceling headphones paired with Brain.fm (cheap).  Between them, I'll know within 5-10 minutes if there's any hope for a productive night.

The "music" of Brain.fm isn't something you want to play in your car or at a party.  The sound quality is low, and the variety is lacking.  If you want those things, use Apple Music.  The odd, but often slightly familiar sounds somehow straighten out my brain.  In fact, I just let it work.  I don't worry about clearing out my head first, and I find that lack of worry actually speeds up the process.

There are some issues such as service uptime and the constant changes to the app interface on iOS, but nothing I can't forgive.  I use it all the time and wrote most of my book to its computer-generated melodies.

I completed the fourth draft of Stuyvesant's Wall a few weeks ago, but I had to jump into agent research, how to write a query, and so on.

My first ever query went out, and a couple of hours later, my first ever rejection rolled in.  I was astonished how quickly it all happened.  There was no time whatsoever for me to brace for it - I half expected never to get a response.  The query itself took me a week to write, and I thought it was pretty good.  At least enough to get an agent curious.

It stings, I won't lie.

To work four years to get to this point, only to have your dreams dashed to bits by someone who only read a few paragraphs, hurts.  What was it?  What did I do wrong?  Do I bother asking?

An action plan is now in the works.  I need to identify and explore my weaknesses as a prospective author and try to address them.  More articles on the site will undoubtedly be one.

The road was never going to be easy, and I knew that, and I can't let the first bump rattle me.  Or maybe it woke me up.

Yesterday I started draft no. 4.  It was back in March, the 20th or so, that I took the final snapshot of the 3rd draft.

That means I've spent more than two months just preparing for this edit.  Given a limited sample size of just four chapters, I won't be done for 6 to 8 weeks, with each chapter taking an average of two hours.

When it's done, I'd love to write about the experience, but for now, I have to focus.  Time is as precious as ever, although holding together my fraying scraps of motivations might be more important.  Each step I take is new and presents challenges I didn't expect, straining my determination.

It's a damn good thing I enjoy it.

Where does the time go?

This site hasn’t been updated in nearly two years!  Wow.  So much has happened between reading about Sherman, which was the topic of my second-to-last post, and now, that I couldn’t begin to recount it all.  All the books, all the writing, all the learning, and all the struggles and triumphs.

Maybe there weren’t a lot of triumphs.  Mostly struggles.

Today, I finished chapter 33 of the 3rd draft.  That’s out of 35, so that’s good progress.  The book might be crap, but the progress is good.  Perhaps I should remind everyone that everything is relative, including book authorship throughput.  Measure how you will.  I gave up.  It’s too depressing.

To recap:

• First draft, 2 years and 110,000 words
• Second draft, complete rewrite, and 1 year at 80,000 words
• Third draft, 95% rewrite, and 1 year at probably about 80k (I haven’t checked)
  • Probably three more weeks of work

Draft No. Four will be new territory for me.  It will be the first time I’m not starting over from scratch.  That’s big and scary and not entirely true, as in, I edited the first draft, story and copy, before admitting it was garbage.  I really don’t have a good guess on how long it will take, only a bad one that might get lucky.  Let’s say a couple of months if I can focus.

I think I also have to change the title of the site.  There are probably only a handful of people who understand how truly terribly ironic it is.

A special year in my head for awhile has been 1646, the year my ancestor Jan Thomasz came to America.  It's a year printed on an officially stamped document from a genealogical society back in the 1920s.  It was commissioned by my great grandfather and includes evidence of lineage.  However, in my research of New Netherland for the book, I came across several references to good old Thomasz that hinted at other dates.  1644, 1642, and 1641 to be exact.

Now there is a new date: 1939.  Again, this was found by accident, this time while rummaging around for ship names.  Well, maybe it wasn't a total accident.  While I was elbow deep in old records, I decided to try a search using various spellings.  I've used other sources and websites before, but all my searches have come up empty.

In an old, hand-typed newsletter, I found the following...

23 Mar 1639 [not. H. Schaef, 1377/31]. Testament of Jan Thomasz from Amsterdam, sailing as adelborst (midshipman) on De Haring to New Netherland.

https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE8347211

I like to verify details like this, and I did, but I can't seem to locate the link to a document I found.  When I do, I'll update this post.

For the book I'm writing, I did a lot of reading and research about the Native Americans of New York, specifically the Mohawks and Mohicans.  It wasn't easy.  Not because there isn't material out there, but because of the questionable quality, lack of consistency, and only relatively recent written records.

Names, places, and dates were often in conflict, but more worrisome is that often even stories and legends contradicted themselves.  I read this is partially due to a mixing of tribes and cultures due to relocations, and also because of written records being influenced by European and Christian beliefs.  There are also things like sloppy or sometimes made up research, fictional stories or novels that become ingrained as fact, and so on.

The internet proved to be the biggest source of contradiction as if that should come as a surprise to anyone.  I used DEVONagent Pro frequently to take a deep dive when I'd run into a tight spot, only to find myself more confused.  More and more, I felt ashamed that so much history and culture now seems forever lost, since I think the proliferation of all these "facts" probably has already reached a point of no return... I hope I'm wrong.

The author part of me, the one who has to write the book, had to make decisions that were often swayed by which one fit the story the best or sounded the most probable.  It gave me a flexibility that I never felt entirely comfortable with, but I couldn't tell the story otherwise.

I sincerely tried my best to present both nations as real people, with flaws and strengths, and with many of the same struggles that the world has today.  Despite the frustrations, I'm glad I took the time to get to know the original inhabitants of the place I call home.  

Why is that that vocabularies seemed so much better way back when?  When could be a hundred years, two hundred, a thousand, it doesn't matter.  Yesterday I finished reading a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, who, like many of his day, corresponded regularly with letters to a large number of people.  It's because of those letters, and a memoir he wrote, we can see his broad and impressive variety of words.

I have no such vocabulary, nor do most people I know, but some certainly use big words with more regularity.  Of course, there are a lot of words that I use today that didn't exist back then (Sherman was a general of the Civil War), although I still feel somewhat inferior.  Maybe it's because we don't write as much.  Maybe it's because of TV or a greater selection of books, most of which are familiar and not written by Shakespeare or a Greek philosopher.  I don't know.

One of the things I love about the Kindle is the ability not only to look up words but also that it records those words I looked up.  Later, when there's a great word that I know will fit perfectly, but I just can't remember what it was, I can go back and find it.  I can't help but a feel an irony with technology like that.

Last week I started reading The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1, by Edward Gross and Mark Altman.  Overall, it's a good book, but there was one quote that caught my attention because of its familiarity and suddenly making me feel less crazy.  

JACKIE COON FERNANDEZ

His way of writing was going to bed with the thought in his head of what he had to come up with, and then it was there when he got up. It was just there. He went from sleeping soundly to getting up feeling fresh, and it just came out of his fingers onto the typewriter and he just never had to think about it.

Jackie was referring to Gene Coon, a writer for the original Star Trek series.

Allowing my subconscious to do the heavy lifting has been my approach to not just writing, but other problems that need solving.  It might sound like "sleeping on it," but I think this is a little different.  It's trusting a part of you that is under no direct control to perform miracles, or at least it can seem that way when it works, which is more often than not.

Of course, I'm not popping amphetamines, but I'm not under Gene Roddenberry's whip either.