Gary Hurtubise

Welcome to my World(s)

Category: writer (Page 1 of 2)

DIY MFA Prompt: What’s Your Writing Superpower?

January 28, 2019 / / 0 Comments

In this prompt, we were asked to take the Storytelling Superpower Quiz (why don’t you try it too?), to determine what aspect of our personality helps us write our best stories, and to inform us as to what type of character we should be writing about.

My Writing Superpower: the Disruptor

            According to my results, I’m “drawn to larger-than-life characters who rebel against the status quo,” and that my stories are all about me sharing my ideals with the world… yeah.  Ok.  That sounds about right.

            As my hubby can attest to, I definitely don’t sit idly by and let the world have their piece of me.  I’ve never looked up to authority; rather, I’ve sought to be it.  And that is most definitely reflected in my characters (Egin, for example – the protagonist of my novel Darksea – is an autistic young man who can’t listen to others… it’s simply not in his makeup.

As Gabriela – a fellow disruptor –  alluded to in the prompt, going against the grain or questioning, well, everything, does land me into trouble, in that inconvenient thing we call real life (I’ll choose not to include examples here, for my Monday morning ego’s sake).

DIY MFA Prompt #1: How did you become a writer?

January 24, 2019 / / 0 Comments

            This is the first in a series of written responses to prompts, provided by Gabriela Pereira of DYI MFA.  I’ll do my best to keep them short and sweet!

            I suspect my superpower is not writing per se, but planning (ie: storyboarding, creating backstory; the opposite of ‘pantsing’).

            From as early as I could write & spell, I busied myself drawing maps, creating place- and character-names, imagining back-stories, and setting the stage for many a story… (To this day, they’re all sitting on a shelf in my office, waiting with dusty, inert patience to be brought alive.)

            Writing came later, catalyzed by a trio of elements.

  • A job at the library while in high school fed my ceaseless appetite for books, expanding my mind – and my vocabulary;
  • OCD-fueled perfectionism helped polish my craft (there, their and they’re?  You can be absolutely sure I *don’t* mix those up);
  • Unremitting introvertism kept me in my room late at night, trapped at my keyboard as words burst forth from my fingertips.

            Combined, I use my powers of planning, and my honed writer’s craft, in the quest to reach the mighty ship, ‘Author’, battling that evil monkey, ‘The Procrastinator’, who plots tirelessly to bring an end to my written endeavours.

Tweaking My Writing Routine + DIY MFA

January 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Happy 2019!

It’s been a while since I wrote my last post.  For good reason, though: I’ve been busy writing!

Update on my Writing

            Darksea is still getting shopped around at smaller presses, my next novel’s word count is slowly growing, I finished and submitted another short story, and I’m re-tweaking two other shorts for re-submission.

            Additionally, I’m continuing to write articles for Gay Parent Magazine, and my foray into the world of Ghostwriting is slowly producing fruit.

            All told, I couldn’t shouldn’t be happier with how things are progressing, writing-wise.  (See what I did there?)

            There’s always room for tweaking a routine.

Tiny Habits

I tried something called Tiny Habits in the fall, which resulted in a… well, tiny improvement in my daily writing schedule (tiny, but one that has had an effect on my writing habits every day since then!).  Tiny Habits, created by Stanford Professor BJ Fogg, is fun, easy, and free to try.  I highly recommend it – a ‘session’ only takes five days.  You really have nothing to lose by doing so.

Chunking Tasks Throughout the Day

            With more room for improvement, I enlisted hubby’s help to set aside chunks of my day for specific writing tasks (previous to this, our calendar simply said: “Gary – Writing”, which was far too vague for this expert procrastinator + excuse-finder).

            So now, my Monday to Sunday schedule looks a little something like:

  • 5:30 – 7:00 am             –           Fiction Writing;
  • 9:30 – 11:00 am           –           Ghost Writing;
  • 7:30 – 9:00 pm             –           Extra Writing.

(with one of my Ghost Writing sessions being set aside for “writing administration”)

            That’s been working pretty well so far…

            …which brings us to DIY MFA!

DIY MFA

I’d seen adverts for Gabriela Pereira’s program for some time, and it had caught my interest several times.  In a nutshell, this do-it-yourself Masters-of-fine-arts is a “system or framework for your writing life that will help you create a customized educational plan that works for you.”  Gabriela states that, when you boil the MFA right down, you find a universal formula consisting of three elements:

            writing + reading + community = MFA

            I’m on day 2 of the program, so I don’t have a lot to offer beyond that description at this point.  One element of the program, however, is regular prompts to write, which I will be following*, with regular posts here, over the next month or so.

*I said it, so I’d better do it now, eh?

            …Here goes!

Motivation + Habit = Success at Writing!

September 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I’ll start my 21st post with some (more) words of wisdom from author David Farland, whose #WritingTips I always look forward to in my inbox:

Motivation vs. Habit

On the door at my gym, someone hung a sign that says, “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit keeps you going.”

I began working out regularly over 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve dropped about 75 pounds, and I’ve run or walked something in neighborhood of 22,000 miles. I can’t even imagine how much I’ve lifted in weights. But think about it, if someone had said to me, “Hey, Dave, why don’t you go run 22,000 miles?” it would have taken an awful lot of motivation to get me going.

However, it only took a tiny bit of habit.

Writing is much the same way. A lot of us try hard to get motivated to write a novel. But writing a novel is a lengthy process. Being motivated doesn’t help much, but developing good writing habits helps a lot.

I learned long ago that exercise is hard when you’re starting out. If you run three days, you’ll want to quit at the end of them. That’s when muscle aches and fatigue are the strongest. But if you run for a week, you’ll begin to notice that you feel better on the days that you’ve run. Soon, the day won’t feel complete without some exercise.

Writing is much the same. Jumping into a project is hard. Working on a novel for one day doesn’t really get you very far into it. But if you try making it a habit—if you bundle all of that motivation up and say to yourself, “I’m going to write for one hour a day this week,” you’ll find at the end of the week that you just don’t really feel that your day is complete if you haven’t spent some time engaged in creative recreation.

With my writing workshops, I generally hold them for a week. I try to motivate my students to write daily during that time, if only for a couple of hours. The goal in part is to teach the writers and get them to develop new skills, but just as importantly, I’m trying to get them into the habit of writing.

Quite often it works. I’ve gotten many letters from writers where the writer has said, “Hey, Dave, I got into the habit of writing at your workshop last year, and I’ve just finished my first/second/third/fourth novel!” Whenever I see that, I always feel as if the mission has been accomplished.

So here’s the key to become a writer: Use your motivation to create a writing habit. Long after you have run out of motivation, you’ll still be writing.

As usual with David’s words of wisdom, I find myself unable to express those ideas any better than him.

Full admission: I’ve fallen out of the *habit* of writing fiction daily.

I have plenty of motivation – heaps and heaps of it!

…Translating that into a habit, though (as David describes) is very hard, especially when you let everything else in your life take precedence. For me, this includes the other side of my quest towards authorship: ghostwriting.

I had an epiphany about this time last year.  It went something like this:

If I wanted to be a full-time writer (one who could feed himself, and his family), I’d need an alternate source of writing income. More specifically, it had to be something that I was already comfortable doing. I dallied in the realm of B2B (business-to-business) writing for a while, but realized that it induced ZERO passion for me. The switch to ghostwriting came about at the end of a course I took with Ed Gandia, who is one of the best-known B2B writers and coaches in the field. Ed got me in touch with Derek Lewis, the best-known writer in *his* field (business ghostwriting), and my goal of becoming a ghostwriter took off from there.

A year-in, and I feel like I’ve got a good amount of momentum going with my ghostwriting business (you can check it out at my other website, LiteraryGhost.com)… and now, it’s time to get back into the *habit* of writing fiction. Every Day. Even if it’s only a couple hundred words.  🙂

 

Offer of Publication: I reject you!

October 3, 2017 / / 2 Comments

(or, 5 reasons why that offer might just not <gulp> be for you)

 

So I’ve been a bit quiet for the last few months, mainly because I didn’t know how to address the topic of this post.  Let’s set the scenario, work through the list, then we’ll debrief afterwards, shall we?

Situation: your manuscript, which you’ve been shopping around for going-on two years, finally has an offer of publication!  Yay!  But what’s that you say?  You aren’t immediately sending a reply with the subject heading: “Yes, Yes, Yes!!!”?!?

Well… why not?

(now here’s the list)

5 Reasons Why You Might Reject That Offer of Publication

5.       Your book will only be available via POD (Print-On-Demand).

Whoops – you’ll be published, but not in the traditional sense.  No books to show for your work.  That being said, if your offer of publication comes from a small-press publisher, I get the sense that this is pretty much how things operate nowadays.  And considering how many people are reading their books via e-readers, it’s really no wonder.

 

4.       You’ll have to do all the marketing for your book, yourself.

If you do not already possess, like, ten thousand friends on <enter social media platform here>, and have a faithful following on Amazon or Goodreads, this could mean the death of your book before it even breathes its first papery breath.  Marketing?  Isn’t that the publisher’s responsibility?  Well… again – in today’s market, I’m learning that most publishers are expecting authors to shoulder at least a portion of their own marketing.

 

3.       No advance (what? no money up front?!)

Nope.  Yet again, unless you are offered a deal with one of the large houses, the likelihood of seeing money before your book is published is very low.  In fact, if you decide to work with a hybrid publishing agency, you’ll be giving them money, and not the other way around!

Hey – let’s say you did get with one of the big publishers.  You’re still only looking at $5000.  Yep, that’s it.  Long gone are the days of $400 000 advances (believe it or not, this is what Stephen King got for his first book, back in the 1970’s!)…

 

2.       You’re afraid that the publisher’s brand is not a good fit with how you want to be perceived as a writer.

You write country-western-actions, but the publisher is known more for cozy-mysteries.  Will that ‘typecast’ you as a cozy-mystery writer for the rest of your career?  If you’re a seasoned author already, probably not (though people might scratch their heads when reading the spine of your next book).  But as a not-yet-published author?  I think this is a very relevant concern.

 

1.        The ‘suggested’ changes to your story that are conditional upon publication make you feel: _______ (fill-in: sad, mad, uncomfortable, scared, confused, etc.).

You’ve poured your blood, sweat and tears into this baby (ie: manuscript) – whether it’s your first or your fifth.  When some stranger tells you your baby is cute, but could be much cuter if you rearrange her face, change her clothes, and re-attach her arms and legs in different positions… hmmm.  That’s hard to swallow.

 

 

And there you have it.  Five reasons why you might say: “thanks, but no thanks”.

Wait!  Before you decide to say those words, realize that the state of publishing today is very different than, say, pre-internet days.  Paper-versions of books are ever so slowly slipping away.  Authors are being asked to shoulder more and more of the burden and responsibility for their books, for less and less money.  Writing is now more a labour of love, rather than labour for cash.  And if you ain’t lovin’ it, regardless of the hassle, you’re probably wasting your time.

Ok.  So, are any of the above reasons legitimate excuses to walk away from an offer of publication?

Numbers 5, 4, and 3 are, in my opinion, simply the realities of the publishing game as of 2017.  You don’t have to like it; just suck it up (if being published is what you truly want).

Numbers 1 & 2, though, are legitimate reasons to hesitate before signing on the dotted line.  You are trying to develop your brand here (especially with your first novel!!).  If your story no longer reflects the vision you had for it, or is presented on a platform that doesn’t fit with your goals, you are doing yourself a disfavour, and could end up damaging your chances for that second book (or any books after that).

And if you haven’t guessed by now, yes – I’ve chosen to reject an offer of publication of my novel “Darksea”.

“Why,” you ask?

Well… see above.  That’s all I’m gonna say.  😛

 

Ok.  That was a bit of a heavy post.  I’ll try to keep things lighter with my next one!

Don’t dismay!  Keep submitting those queries!!

First Short Story Published in Kzine Issue 17!

February 1, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Well, the day has arrived – my first official published story was released on January 28th 2017!

… albeit in Kindle-reader format 😉    (but hey – published is published!!!)

The 17th issue of KZINE – a British sci-fi / horror / fantasy / crime magazine created specifically for the mobile reader – features seven short stories, including my tale Flesh.

Flesh follows the story of an octogenarian in his final few days of life, trying in vain to leave his past behind him.  Of course, there’s a nasty villain, a space station, a gun fight & a high-speed chase, and — just for good measure — a StarWars-esque fall down a bottomless shaft.

Anyways – I’m very excited, and seeing my name in (electronic) print has been a great boost to my recently lagged productivity at the keyboard.  Nothing like some tangible success to get the muse tapping at the window again!

Please check out KZINE, and consider purchasing a copy of the current issue here or here.  You won’t be disappointed!

 

How to Keep Writing Over the Holidays

December 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Feeling down due to the frantic pressure of institutionalized holiday cheer (aka: the purchase of tawdry commercial goods to exchange with family and friends that you’d normally keep no closer than several hundred kilometers at any other time of the year)?

Overwhelmed by the reams of tasks that always seem to build up at this time of year?

Have you already started your yearly holiday treat binge (can you say: let’s add candy canes to everything)?

Or… most importantly…

Have you lost your will to write?

 

…It’s insidious, the way it happens:

Maybe you’ve come off a month of crazy productive writing (aka: NaNoWriMo), and said to yourself: ‘hey – that wasn’t so bad.  I should keep this up for December too!’  And then you find yourself one week from the 25th of December, not having written a bloody thing…

Or maybe you’ve been in a good, dependable writing routine for months, which has inexplicably trickled down to nothing – without you even ‘noticing’?  (But you did notice it, didn’t you?)

 

So what’s your excuse?

Does your holiday make you see red…rum?

The holidays, of course.  They’re a time to slow down, relax, chill-out, enjoy life—what’s that, you say?  They’re the most stressful time of year?!  There’s no time to do anything, much less writing?!?

Of course there’s no time to write!  Everything else at this time of year is too important, you know?  Your family members or your friends or your employer – they all take precedence over you, don’t they?  Don’t be so selfish as to think you can fit this silly little writing habit into your holiday…

So when will there be time for you?  For your writing?

 

Key #1 to successful holiday writing: SELFISHNESS

Yeah.  It’s an ugly word.  But when’s the last time your kids, or your spouse, or your friends, or your boss said: “hey – why don’t you just take today for you?  Don’t worry about us.  We’ll manage just fine.”

I bet it’s been a while, eh?

Remember: if you were sick, they’d manage, wouldn’t they?

If you were away on a trip, they’d manage too.

And even if you said: “you know what?  I’m NOT cooking tonight”, they’d still somehow manage, wouldn’t they?  (They’d just order out pizza, of course.)

So let’s say you do it: pull back from life, and force in a few hours – hell, even a day! – of writing.  You might be surprised (disappointed, even) to learn that you’re not as critical to the smooth running of the universe as you have come to believe.

The first step to writing over the holidays: TAKE time for yourself.

(Oh, but be prepared for pushback.  In fact, you might have to be a bit of a Grinch about it!)

Alright, you’ve gone all selfish and grinchy, and you’ve bought yourself writing time. Now what?  Does the muse immediately jump right back into your life and send you into a whirling, whizzing frenzy of writing?

No, she does not.

You sit at the computer, aglow from you new-found (albeit temporary) writing block, ready to work the magic.  But hold on!  You haven’t checked Youtube in like, at least an hour, so maybe you should just– No, wait!  IT’S A TRAP!

 

Key #2 to successful holiday writing: ACCOUNTABILITY

This is my weakness.  I’m a classic procrastinator.  I work with hard deadlines.  But self-generated ‘soft’ deadlines?  They just make my monkey laugh. (No, I’m not being gross or weird – check out this TED talk on the inner monkey of a procrastinator).

Me, sitting at my desk, alone, without a deadline…  Well, that’s just a recipe for Zero Productivity.

I’ve tried lots of things to put the evil procrastinator monkey in its place:

-making detailed to-do lists, organized by degree of importance and urgency

-setting small, easily attainable goals

-promising myself rewards for work well-done

-the Pomodoro Technique

-setting up a tickler system of file folders in my desk drawer

-trying to work up enough shame and guilt to drive me to ‘get it done’

They all work at first.  Maybe a few days.  Maybe a few weeks, even.  Then something weasel’s its way into the works (typically resulting in an unavoidable change in schedule, even for just a few days), and I’m back to square one, surfing hours (yes, hours) of the best Youtube has to offer.  Or, very often, the not-so-best.

Why were none of these techniques my holy grail for a no-procrastination writing routine?  Well, for one, I don’t believe in a holy grail for anything (life’s too complicated for a single fix, imho).  Secondly, all of the techniques I tried were monitored and policed by… moi.

I can’t do it.  I wish my will was stronger.  And maybe, at some level, I’m just being a cop-out.

 

Regardless of the why, the who has to change.

(And that’s where I should end this post.  Because I don’t know what else to say.  I haven’t solved this problem yet.  I’m not sure who is… who.

Maybe I need an anti-procrastinator coach – someone to hold me to account for my actions and accomplishments day-to-day or week-to-week?

Maybe a writer’s group is the key (in-person would be better – you can more easily ‘slip away’ from an online forum).

Or maybe I need to be looking for a procrastinators-anonymous group out there somewhere?)

 

Anyways, as Christmas ticks closer and closer, I’ll be fighting my monkey, and looking for the solution to who I need to keep me writing.

 

And that’s it for 2016!  Until next year, I wish you and yours a happy and safe holiday season!

NaNoWriMo… here we go again!

October 10, 2016 / / 0 Comments

nanowrimo_crest

Get involved!                    Get writing!

I’ve been on a two-month hiatus from writing my fiction – life and work getting in the way as they always seem to do…

However, as November approaches, there’s a very good reason to get back into fiction writing – one that many writers find is just what they need to jump start their creative endeavours, as the cold weather settles in: NaNoWriMo!

Writing is a uniquely lonely type of thing.  For an introvert (like myself!) it is a welcome escape from the invasive outside world.  It’s therapeutic, too – a balm to soothe the raw stress from all those… people (said with the utmost disgust) intruding themselves upon me day in, day out.

However, I have found that the private nature of writing is a double-edged sword.  There are times when even this introvert (I cringe to admit) craves contact with other like-minded humans.  Specifically the writing kind of humans.

Now, writing being an activity whereby you are lost in your mind and you stare intently at a screen for hours on end, contact with other such beings can be hard to come by… unless you all share a similar goal.  Say, the writing of a complete novel in the space of one month.

Well, look no further: National Novel Writing Month has you covered!  In fact, they couldn’t make it easier for you to get involved – to whatever degree you feel comfortable with.  You fill out some information on yourself and your prospective novel, you pick the local community you’ll be writing with, and once November rolls around, you start writing!  There’s a nifty little graph that shows you how much you’ve written, and if you are on (or off) your word count goal.  There are weekly activities, both locally and across the world that you (again) can participate in, or not.

This will be my third year participating, though I’ll immediately admit I’ll be cheating just a bit – I’m aiming to complete the same novel that I started last year (an urban sci-fi mystery… thingy) – however many words that ends up being.

Regardless of my insidious plans, NaNoWriMo is just what I need to get my fiction writing kick-started again.

21 days and counting…

…in the meantime?  I’ll be getting another batch of agent queries out, and outlining the next bits of that novel that is going to write itself! 😉

Piggyback Your Writing Retreat onto Someone Else’s Hobby!

July 24, 2016 / / 0 Comments

nice-pen

How would you love a four-day writing retreat for one?  Can’t see how to fit it in?  Let me tell you how I just did it.

 

I was in Lake Placid NY this past weekend for the Ironman race.  No.  I’m not an Ironman.  Nor do I ever think I will be.  I’m what’s referred to as an Ironman Sherpa.  My job is to help cart the equipment for, drive around, and generally support one of the Ironmen athletes (who just happens to be my husband).ironman

If you don’t live with an Ironman, or a triathlete in general, you might not understand their routine.  It consists of them going out and doing ridiculous amounts of swimming, biking and running for about a year, in preparation for one full day of – you guessed it – swimming, biking and running.  Plus, they generally go to bed early.  Every night.

Now, if you happen to be a writer – one who enjoys writing in relative peace (like me) – then you might already see how this could be beneficial to your craft.  If, on average, someone training for a race like this puts in two hours per day of training, seven days a week, that turns into roughly 730 hours of writing time (not to mention the time you get after they go to sleep at 8:00pm).

730 hours of writing is just under 15 hours per week – basically the equivalent of a part-time job!  Think of what you could achieve, if you had that time set aside exclusively for writing!!

freetime

Unfortunately, I did not make use of those hundreds of free hours my spouse granted me.  No, it’s not because of procrastination (though there’s a fair amount of that in my schedule L ); alas: we have kids.

Ugh.  The bane of a creative mind.  Small humans whose sole purpose in life is to figure out when you most need a few moments to yourself during the day, and seek to fill those moments with needy little whines, self-generated disasters, pointless arguments with siblings and the ever popular throwing of a fit.  We’ve got two of them.  Small humans, that is.  Two boys.  One who loves to bug, and one who loves to shriek incessantly when bugged.

So for me, those hundreds and hundreds of hours when hubby was out training, I was on Daddy-duty.  Don’t get me wrong: I love my boys.  I love writing too, though.

The payoff comes on race weekend.  Finally – a full year of training has gone by, and we’re ready for the big day (whew!!).  Triathlon is an equipment-intensive sport.  More than one person (ie: the athlete) can comfortably handle.  That’s why it’s nice to have someone along for the race – the Sherpa.

We arrived at Lake Placid – amidst the beautiful Adirondacks – on Thursday afternoon, and left Monday morning.  The race was on Sunday (like – all day Sunday – it takes about 12 hours to complete it.  No joke).  Aside from a few administrative tasks (attending briefings, dropping off bikes, driving the course), that leaves most hours of the day free…

By the way, my husband is my biggest supporter when it comes to my writing, and it was he who saw the opportunity for me; he who suggested I accompany him.  So while I’m taking credit for this blog, it’s he who gets credit for the idea.

 

When exactly did I get my writing in?

-on the drive here and back (it took us 3½ hours each way);

-while my husband attended his pre-race briefings;

-while he did his last few workouts;

-while he dropped all of his kit off at the race site;

-while he slept (restlessly, stressing about the race!);

…AND

-on race day, of course!  12 hours of uninterrupted ‘me’ time.  It was awesome.

Swim start of the 2016 Lake Placid Ironman.

Swim start of the 2016 Lake Placid Ironman.

So now, I’m on the lookout for a new race for him.  I’m thinking a marathon in the fall – that should be worth a three-day mini writing retreat!

 

Are you a writer-with-kids like me?  What do you do to fit writing into the circus that is parenting?  Drop me a line and let me know!!drop_a_line

Last Outpost Military Anthology – My 2nd Short Story to be Published!

June 17, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Last_Outpost-banner

       I submitted one of my short stories to the 3rd Flatiron Hyperpowers Anthology several months ago.  It did not get accepted…  However, one of the judges happened to be Bascomb James, editor of the Far Orbit anthologies published by World Weaver Press, and he liked the story enough to include it in his upcoming “Last Outpost” military SF anthology!

Here’s a list of the authors and their short stories, to be included in the anthology (directly from Bascomb’s website):

“Conscripts” by Gary Hurtubise
“Corners and Curves” by Wendy Sparrow
“Deathbeast” by H.E. Roulo
“Hashtag Whitebitch” by Shauna O’Meara
“My Letters” by George Allen Miller
“Names” by Todd C. Wilson
“Ripplers” by John Moralee
“Risk Assessment” by David Tallerman
“Swimming Stars” by Andrew Wilson
“The Copper Queen’s Bazaar” by J.B. Rockwell
“The Quarry” by Marc Ferris
“The Thorne Legacy” by J.D. Brink

I’m very happy and honoured to be included in this list!  Can’t wait to see it in print, sometime in the fall of 2016!

« Older posts

© 2024 Gary Hurtubise

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑