Author: M.R. Kistler

And now for something completely different.

by M.R. Kistler

Today I took a break from 124,000 word epics to submit a new short story for consideration. I’ve ignored short fiction in recent years, so writing the piece was an uncomfortable experiment in stretching atrophied muscles.

That said, I’m rather pleased with the final result. It’s an emotive tale about a young teen boy, his mother, and their struggle for survival in a dystopian future world. Not much happens – he chops some wood and thinks about the chores ahead for the day while reminiscing about what happened to the world and how they ended up where they are – but I think it’s a more compelling tale than that summary leads you to believe. In any case, it felt good to step outside my self-imposed box for a few hours.

Now, BACK TO THE BOX. The next chapters of this epic fantasy saga will not, in fact, write themselves. Believe me, I’ve asked. They told me to pound sand and then stole my lunch money.

Or maybe I rewrote the same chapter three times to get it right and then ascribed annoying, human traits to my disjointed creative process so I could be angry at someone other than myself.

One of those.

In any case – time to get back to it. Tally ho!

Writing is War

by M.R. Kistler

I think of myself as a relative pacifist. I’m strongly in favor of approaching almost every situation with an eye toward non-confrontation…

… except for writing. When faced with my laptop and that blinking cursor on a blank page, I morph into a maniacal GI Jane bent on world domination and ready to burn this mother to the ground to get it done. If rage-writing is a thing, it’s my thing. Some people talk about writing from a place of eerie calm – like it’s a sort of zen process in a place where elfin muses frolic around a whispering fountain at the center of a combed-sand rock garden.

I do not have a zen garden.

I have a loud, in-your-face, full on Bruce Willis action movie of a process, and if I don’t have a rage hangover by the time I’m finished writing for the day it probably means nothing really brilliant came out. A great writing day means I spent most of it cage fighting my muse until she tapped out in submission covered in blood and various effluvia from the pair of us. Not unlike childbirth, giving life to a story is a loud, messy, mortifying process that strips away all ego and leaves you fighting for your life in the far, dark reaches of your primitive lizard brain.

It’s a helluva drug and I can’t wait to do it again tomorrow.

#amquerying

by M.R. Kistler

Querying is a bit like having abdominal surgery in slow-motion.

Without anesthesia.

Sending your story – your precious baby – out into the world to agents who may love it or hate it, or may love it and already have a similar author on their list, or who love it but think it’s not what the market is looking for right now… You can see where I’m going with this.

Agents receive SO MANY submissions (seriously – just take a gander at querytracker.com – it’s more intimidating than Tindr and I haven’t dated in 20 years.) There’s rarely time for a personalized reply, which means you’ll probably never know what an agent loved or hated about your manuscript.

The point is, querying can get you down. There may be months between submissions and responses and, even when you get a request for a partial or full manuscript, chances are pretty good you’ll still be a pass.

I’ve come to terms with all of these realities fairly quickly because Life Is Too Short and, frankly, too much navel gazing threatens to send me into a despair spiral involving wine-and-chocolate binges and NO, I will not be providing photographic evidence of this.

My personal version of “Pics or it didn’t happen” is “If there are no photos, you can never prove it happened”.

I don’t think anyone who creates art feels no need for external validation that what we create is beautiful to someone besides ourselves but, despite the struggles of agent-hunting, I still write because I can’t NOT write.

Writing is, in and of itself, one of my greatest pleasures. There’s a sublime satisfaction in putting the right word in precisely the right place to make a sentence sing. The right words dance across the tongue, caress the lips, and seduce the senses.

With that in mind, I’ll be sharing a few bits of my short-form writing. I participate (with sad inconsistency of late) in the #VSS365 project on The Twitter, wherein a word of the day is used in a single tweet to tell a Very Short Story (and you’re welcome; I know wondering about the hashtag was making you twitchy.)

I’ll also share the odd snippet of poetry and, now and again, a brief glimpse of whatever I’m working on at the moment.

Find me on Twitter @MRKistlerWrites if you need a cheerleader or a good swift kick in the nethers to keep you going. Wherever you are in the process of “Writing As A Vocation”, the real secret is: don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. If writing brings you joy, keep going, get better, write more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Then check your email again, because one of these days the right agent will swipe right. (That’s how that works, right? I’m not actually on Tindr. Spousal Unit frowns on that sort of shenanigans and frankly he’s all the man I can handle.)