“Anything fun in your day so far?” a friend asked me this morning.
Well, let’s see. I dressed in black from head to toe, wearing a t-shirt that reads, Pay No Attention to My Browsing History, I’m a Writer, Not a Serial Killer to work. Appeared on camera and shamelessly plugged my novel, discussed my fondness for lava lamps, and made it rain by dramatically tossing $150 in tens and twenties into the air. Ran into the Secretary afterward, the Head Cheese if you will, still clutching a paperback copy of No Time for Kings in my hand, and he asked where he could buy it. His Executive Staff Assistant, who owns the very same Rubik’s Cube tissue dispenser as me (neither here nor there but interesting nonetheless), said, “You’re such a cool guy, Mark!” I modestly thanked her and returned to my cubicle, a good one with a window, and watched the rain that had been falling for 18 hours turn to snow and gradually paint the Beltline white.
Ashley picked a good day to ask the question, because a typical CheeseGov nine-to-five looks nothing like this. And I didn’t even mention the fire alarm test, but that was more ear-splitting than fun.
I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve flaunted the dress code by wearing a t-shirt (especially one that alludes to murder) or tossed fistfuls of cash into the air. I’ve never even brought in my book before, come to think of it. But there’s a good and logical reason for all this: the Communications team is shooting an introductory video for NEWD…err, NEED…orientation, and we decided to have fun with it by sharing two personal facts about us. Introvert that I am, I hate being on video. Counterintuitively, with no choice in the matter, I decided to ham it up and be as over-the-top and wacky as possible. If I have to do a video, I reasoned, I’m going to make it memorable:
I’m Mark, I’m the external comms manager, I wrote a book. Cue book. Said book includes murder and mayhem so ignore my browsing history. Cue t-shirt. I have an extensive lava lamp collection and a very high electric bill. Cue cash.
The money thing, by the way, was a total ad-lib. I reached for my wallet midway through the shoot but found it mostly empty. Sensing that my $12 wouldn’t adequately represent big electric bills, the videographer grabbed his wallet, took out a stack of cash, and let me use it as a prop. Trusting fella, that one (and what’s he doing after hours to pad his wallet like that?).
If CheeseGov were handing out Oscars, pretty sure I’d nab Best Actor.
Hey, speaking of my book, guess what? I’ve finally, officially, begun work on the sequel!
After teasing a No Time for Kings follow-up for years, I realized the damn thing wasn’t going to write itself, so I just jumped in. Do I have a plot? I have loose threads, baby! An outline? Only if a few hastily scribbled notes count. Hell, even the title — Earth Fights Back — isn’t written in stone. I consider it a working title that may or may not become permanent.
Rather than worry over these not-so-trivial details, I feel a strange sense of calm. I have always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants writer; that’s just the way I work best. Trust me, I’d love to be able to develop an outline and know in advance how I was going to get from Point A to Points B, C, and D. But that just ain’t my method.
All those same things were true of No Time for Kings, even the title (it was originally called Stabbing Nature). I had nothing more than a vague direction of where I wanted things to go when I started writing, but I think it all worked out well in the end. In fact, not having an outline allowed the story to evolve in unforeseen ways. One of my main characters is secretly an alcoholic, and I was completely unaware of this until the moment those words appeared on the page. This was totally unplanned but brought some much-needed conflict to the story. That’s the type of creative freedom that’s only possible when you’re going in blindly.
The same goes for Dream Sailors. In that case, I took a very basic concept — a group of people learn how to bring back objects from their lucid dreams — and ran with it. True, I haven’t published Dream Sailors, and Amazon killed their Vella platform last month, so that poor guy is sitting in limbo. Anybody wanna read it?
In any case, I knocked out 1,304 words in Earth Fights Back on day one while enjoying that oh-so-familiar writer’s high. God, I’ve missed that feeling! It’s like the best damn Brass Monkey you’ve ever had. (Sounds better than saying “like crack,” which has become such a cliche.) I hope to ride this wave all the way to The End!
What’s your definition of a fun day at work? If you’re a writer, do you plot out your story in advance or just wing it like me?
Mark My Words 
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