Back Home From Hollywood

I’m fresh and tense from a visit to the dentist this morning and have that wicked whine of a drill reverberating in my brain. With how much dental work I’ve had done this year, which included many fillings, a crown, and a couple of extractions, I won’t do any double-takes from seeing my name on my dentist’s vanity plate. But the work needs to be done, and I see light at the end of my year-long treatment plan. Two more visits should complete it. Less you don’t know, smokeless tobacco is a nasty, ill-advised habit. Having quit more than a decade ago, I’m still paying for it. The good news is nothing cancerous has shown and the deterioration of my teeth is hidden and fixable. I consider myself fortunate.

This week’s intention is to recover from a career milestone celebrated last week. To those new to Dopamine’s Delight, I recently won the Writers of the Future contest with my short story, “Squiddy.” 

Along with having the story published in my favorite anthology, the prize was a trip to Hollywood for a week-long workshop and award ceremony gala. For the gala, they gave us the full Hollywood treatment, including a limo ride and a red carpet walk with snapping pictures and press interviews. After the gala, we signed books for a long line of readers. If you suspect I felt out-of-body the whole night through, you are correct. Simply a dream. Best of all, my family flew out for the gala: my mom, dad, sister, wife, and kiddo. Thanking my family while on stage gave me the biggest nerves for the night as I worried I’d break down in an ugly cry. I did keep it together, largely thanks to the bright lights that kept me from seeing their faces in the audience. 

For today’s Dopamine’s Delight, I’m truncating a week full of delights to a few highlights: a 24-hour story, an art reveal, the gala, and a homecoming. Oh. And there’s a book release today. That’s a huge delight. Details about it will be at the end of this post. 

A Story Written in 24 hours

The famed 24-hour story is a rite of passage that all Writers of the Future workshop participants endure, often selling their stories afterwards with minimal revisions. Before the workshop, the idea of writing a full short story in 24 hours induced me into shudders. Why? I’m a slow drafter. Generally, it takes me several weeks to finish a first draft. One culprit to my tortoise pace is I don’t quiet the editor's brain when drafting. Often I’ll write a sentence, tweak said sentence, then sometimes delete it altogether. That makes for slow going, which dips into dreadful going, and dregs up an often-cited quote by Ernest Hemingway:

I relate to his frustration and pride. Truth be told, I’ve romanticized Hemingway’s hyperbole about his process, having that quote framed for a time above my writing desk. And it did help me when the going got tough. It urged me not to quit. The difficulty I felt was simply part of this gig. And hell. Who am I to complain if it was felt by one of the masters? But important to note and a treat I’m still unwrapping is a different relationship exists with writing stories. Think more of a spectrum. Hemingway struggled on one end. On the opposite played Ray Bradbury:

This quote pictured above on an image found via Google is pulled from an essay by Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing. If you are a writer and in need of inspiration, go to your library or bookstore and get yourself a copy. It’s a gem of a book from a gem of a writer. While you're at it, buy yourself his full catalog of stories. It’ll be time and money well spent. His poetic prose. His fantastical stories. He bottled up magic. But I digress. Back to that spectrum. 

While the actual context of this quote is about whether a writer should write to the market, it drips with the nectar he injects into all of his writing, and it pulls back the curtain of his wizardry.

In Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury details how he wrote his stories by association. As he tells it, he didn’t sit down with a full story, fleshed out in his mind. Barely even a snippet. Let alone theme. Or ending. Instead, he’d write a list of nouns he loved. Carnivals. Mars. Dinosaurs. He’d list them all. And before he’d know, from one of those nouns or two, a story would emerge and sweep him in its current. The flow state. He could summon it up at will. Try as I might, I’ve rarely tasted such verve while writing. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do and find love when I’m doing it, but my relationship with the craft leans more toward work than play. More Hemingway than Bradbury. Mind you, I’m talking about process, not mastery or style. 

So I came into the 24-hour story with trepidation, dashed with excitement. And my heart thumped like a tom-tom drum when Jody Lynn Nye and Robert J. Sawyer walked around the room handing out random items to the writers.

Wait? What? Random items? Yes. Your confusion is my intention. Please, forgive me. I’ve yet to describe the full exercise.

During the workshop, along with in-person instruction by some of the greats of science fiction and fantasy (Yes. Pinch me.), we read and discussed essays by L. Ron Hubbard. 

One such essay is called “Magic Out of a Hat,” where he discusses how magic happened after wearing a waste basket on his head as a dare from another writer. Abracadabra. Presto. That waste basket became a Russian kubanka hat. 

From that story seed, he spun a World War I action-adventure tale. Another of his essays we read, “Circulate,” details how Jack London used to visit a seaside pub and pay for the drinks of sailors in exchange for brine-soaked conversations, which he used for his stories.  Now, that’s my kind of research.

At the first workshop forty years ago and every year since, contest winners used those essays as a framework to write a short story in 24 hours. First, we are given a random item. Next, we are told to interview a stranger. From those prompts, we write our stories. 

Here’s my item:

Jody Lynn Nye knitted it herself from a pattern generated by AI. As soon as she told me how the pattern was created, my gears started cranking, spitting out different science-fiction dystopian yarns. Pun cheekily intended. While I had a few concepts to explore, I didn't have any fictional characters to torment and grow, so no story. That would come from my talk with a stranger. And I had time. Shortly more than twenty-four hours as the hands of the clock hadn’t yet struck 2pm, which was when we could start any research for our stories.

I’m the woo in the video. The only woo. Was I masking my fear via wooing? Perhaps some. Although I was genuinely excited. 

We hustled out of the room. Some writers immediately snagged their interviews. I, notebook in hand, moseyed through the hotel and passed, with notable envy, many conversations among writers and hotel guests. I was choosy. That’s what I told myself, anyhow. In truth, with flashbacks of past middle school dances, nervousness dictated my pickiness. 

Forty-five minutes in, no dice. I left the hotel for an attached mall. There, I discovered my courage and had a few strangers rebuff my advances. At least, none of them screamed, “Stranger Danger!”

I eventually found a woman with a toddler skeptically willing to talk. Both of us nervous, the conversation smoothed out as she discussed how she found herself living in Los Angeles. After ten minutes, we parted. She apologized, saying she didn’t give me any story substance to use. I reassured her she did—very much the truth—and thanked her for her time and wished her well.

Feeling each tick of the clock, I set off to outline. An hour later, I abandoned the outline, as I usually do, and pantsed my way through the story. I drafted into the wee hours of the morning. 

Exhaustion begged me to go to bed. I gave in near 2am. I slept for four hours. I woke and got back to it. I drafted past noon before I typed END. A few passes of revisions later, I emailed off my submission. I was sweating. No kidding. Dang you, sympathetic nervous system. So it goes. 

Phew! Wow! I did it! I wrote a full story within 24 hours. And I’m happy with it. After a little TLC—but not much—I will send it out to markets.

This exercise taught me a lot. First, it raised my own expectations. Not that I’ll regularly write to that schedule. That writing schedule each day would be pure drudgery and lead to quick burnout. But I have it within me to do so if ever in a pinch. Also, that idea of bleeding at my writing desk doesn’t have to be so. Nor do I need to wait for the muse to get to scribing. Simply give me a random item and let me circulate. That’s my new secret of pulling magic out of a hat. 

The Art Reveal

The Writers of the Future contest also runs a contest for illustrators. Can you guess what it’s called? Bingo. The Illustrators of the Future. Nice. You guessed it right out of the gate.

A dream for me is they assign each winning illustrator a winning story to illustrate. Being told I won the contest last April, I had a full year of speculation about what the illustration would look like. It was a common subject for discussion between my wife and me, which sometimes led to debates. After seeing Tyler Vail’s illustration, I’m grateful our varied visions were wrong. Lesson received. I’ll stick to writing. 

The illustrations were hidden from us the first few days of the workshop. They even went to the lengths of cutting out the illustrations from an anthology we used for promotional videos. I know. Gasp. Sorry, Ray Bradbury. But I appreciated the defacement. Not seeing the illustration for Squiddy until the grand reveal helped build a crescendo of emotions that crested when we were ushered into a room full of our illustrations and told to find them. Many thoughts and emotions ping-ponged in my head. What if I didn’t instantly recognize the illustration? With my expectations so high, is there a chance, perchance, the illustration wouldn’t meet them? Oh. Goodness. I’m not one to hide my emotions from my face. Thankfully, those anxieties were quickly squashed. I instantly found Tyler’s work. Rather it found me. 

Ugh. Tyler’s illustration is achingly, hauntingly beautiful. The despair in Jocelyn’s eyes. How tragically well he depicted her at wits’ end. Looking at it, as I intimately know her, I want to cry. Tell her she can get through her despair and her addiction. Tell her that through her resilience, she’ll find hope. I’m currently novelizing Squiddy. Undoubtedly, Tyler’s illustration will bleed into Jocelyn’s full story. It’s a magical thing, the collaboration between two artists of two different mediums. Once merely a figment of my imagination, Jocelyn feels more human. She breathes. She hurts. She fails. She dusts herself off. 

And no surprise here. Tyler won the Golden Brush award for this illustration. That’s the grand prize for the illustrators. The whole shebang. He’s a talent to watch. From me, he has a lifelong fan. Here’s his website.

The Gala

The folks at Writers and Illustrators of the Future know how to put on a good show. I knew that going in. I’ve watched each gala since I began entering in 2019. Each time, I dreamed myself up on the stage, imagining what it’d be like to have my art celebrated. That thought exercise became inspiration I harnessed to keep writing and submitting. It took fourteen entries of never missing a quarterly deadline to finally win. 

While those details I imagined were vivid and sweet, they didn’t come close to the real thing. I could go and on about the delights of that night. Rather, I’d let those curious watch for themselves.

A Homecoming

Ahh. Home. Nothing is sweeter. After a week in Hollywood with wide-ranging emotions, delight hit me when the plane wheels touched down on the tarmac. Even lovelier was to get outside into the mountains. Time slows there. My senses all heighten. The best is when I hike with the kiddo. 

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 40 Is Available Now

Today is the day. What day? The day that L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 40 is released into the wild. At least in the U.S. and Canada. The international release date is July 9th, 2024. I’d be so thrilled and grateful if you bought yourself one. It’s available in most places where books are sold. Here’s a link for it on Amazon. 

And once you read or listen to it, please give it your honest review. Reviews matter a great deal. First, they inform readers about stories they may like. Second, those e-commerce algorithms heavily weigh the number of reviews for their search engines. The more reviews a book receives the more chances others will find it.

I’m over the moon that Squiddy will be read by many. I’d be grateful and delighted if you were one of those readers. 

Until next Dopamine’s Delight…