writing

"Sidekicks!" is out, and available through Amazon, B&N, and the Apple App store. (But if you purchase it directly from the publisher, the authors--myself included--get a bigger cut.)

From the Read Village review: "This collection is clever, weird, disturbing and smart in a Twilight Zone meets Saturday Night Live kind of way."

They gave an individual shout-out to my story, "Alex and the OCD Oracle," too!

"And then there is the story “Alex and the OCD Oracle” by D. Robert Hamm about a partnership that defies explanation. Involving diet soda, nudity, fantasy, mythology and an inflatable kiddie pool, this adventure is just plain odd. Readers will like it. Readers will hate it. Readers will reread it in broad daylight to make sure they did not conjure it in a dream."

Table of Contents (You may recognize some of these names):

“Introduction” by Alasdair Stuart

“Coffee and Collaborators” by Patrick Tomlinson

“Hunter and Bagger” by Alex Bledsoe

“Alex and the OCD Oracle” by D. Robert Hamm (Hey, that's me!)

“Quintuple-A” by Nayad Monroe

“Hero” by Kathy Watness

Fangirl” by Steve Lickman

“After the Party” by  Graham Storrs

Learning the Game” by Michael Haynes

“Doomed” by KW Taylor

“In The Shadow Of His Glory” by Bill Bodden

Second Banana Republic” by Donald J. Bingle

“The Balance Between Us” by Alexis A. Hunter

“The Decent Thing to Do” by Daniel R. Robichaud

The Minion’s Son” by Daniel O’Riordan

The Old West” by Matt Betts

“Worthy” by Mary Garber

“Relic of the Red Planet” by Neal Litherland

The Gold Mask’s Menagerie” by Chanté McCoy

“A Recipe for Success” by Alana Lorens

“At Your Service” by Kelly Swails

Click the "read more" for a brief excerpt from “Alex and the OCD Oracle,” my story in the collection. Read more about The "Sidekicks!" anthology is out!

I talk a lot about what I call "casual art." By "casual art," I mean art made for fun, without too much worry about whether or not it's going to meet some arbitrary standard. Art is primarily a means of self-expression and communication, and it doesn't have to be perfect to have value.

Some art, of course, we want to polish and put out there to a wider audience for one reason or another, but even that art often won't be perfect at first. Keep in mind that a final piece often goes through some ugly, or at least blatantly clumsy, stages, and it's okay if your own pieces aren't perfect the first time around.

Writers especially need to learn that lesson. I've seen many aspiring writers become impatient and discouraged because their first drafts don't live up to their standards, but here's something they may not realize: Most published works go through a cubic buttload of revisions before you see them, and often the final version bears little or no resemblance to the first.

There are many approaches to get from idea to finished manuscript, and many of us start out with what we call a "discovery draft," which roughly translates to "stuff we spooge out onto the page with little or no idea of what the final form is going to be, just to kind of get the glimmerings of an idea down so that we can go back and make something less hideous of it later, but not anything that could remotely be called by such a lofty term as first draft and OH MY GOD DON'T YOU LOOK AT THAT IT'S NOT EVEN READY FOR CRITIQUE YET I KNOW IT SUCKS OKAY."

Ahem.

Basically, discovery drafts, and other early drafts, are allowed to suck. You'll make it better later, but you have to actually write it first. Or to put it in my friend Kij Johnson's words, "Once it's on the page, it can be fixed."

So in the spirit of encouraging others, here is a little portion of a discovery draft (written at about 4am when I suddenly sat up in bed to hammer out a few paragraphs in like, ten minutes)--unedited, in the exact form I initially wrote it--from a project you'll see published sometime this next year, just so you can see how clumsy these things often are. Read more about Once it's on the page, it can be fixed

Once again, I find myself in a position of killing darlings I created in a moment of passion. Every writer does it, and it does get easier, but there's always at least a little bit of an "ouch" involved. In case you're not familiar with the expression, to kill one's darlings means to take out things you've written that you personally love, but that for one reason or another don't pull their weight in the story. Like the 615 word bit of scene-setting below, which I'm including to give an example of a perfectly good darling that nonetheless had to die, and to gratify my desire to have someone other than my writing group see it. (You'd also never know to read this snippet that most of what I write is more "fun.")

There are lots of reasons why a darling might have to die. Maybe it screws up your pacing, or contains a jarring shift in style or perspective (either of which is fine if that's what you're going for). Maybe it doesn't really have much to do with the rest of the story, and is only there because you personally found it interesting to write. Maybe there are just too damn many words for the length of the thing you're trying to write, and the story needs other words more than it needs that scene, or that chunk of exposition, or that subplot. For whatever reason, sometimes you have to kill your darlings to make your story stronger.

The deadline for The Crimson Pact anthology, volume 3 is coming up at the end of the month. I've been planning to do an indirect sequel to Karma, my Quiet World story from volume 2--but from Kai Traeger's point of view as he and Halloween Jack (aka Jaqueline Hallow) investigate how the demons got there to begin with. Read more about Projects and deadlines and demons, oh my!

(Note: This essay is in the middle of a rewrite, so you may find inconsistencies and redundancies here and there. It was one of the more popular posts at the old version of the site, though, so I'm throwing it out there as-is, despite the issues. I also have to give credit to my friends, teachers, and mentors, among them Kij Johnson (the first professional to tell me that I should be writing for a living), Matt Schmeer, Greg Luthi, Aaron Rosenberg, Erick "The Story Doctor" King, and especially my dear friend Lane Robins--aka Lyn Benedict--for seeing potential in me, guiding me, ripping my work apart when need be, and helping me learn, and to the Wednesday Night Writers, as well as to Janet Burroway--whom I have never met--for her excellent textbook, "Writing Fiction; A Guide to the Narrative Craft." I am by no means an expert; again, I'm just passing on a little of what I've learned along the way.)

I hear a lot of would-be fiction writers say they "don't believe" in studying writing. They fear that to do so will force them to write by some preset formula and destroy their "personal styles." Nothing could be further from the truth. If you look at some of the greats--who have wildly divergent styles--you will find that they almost universally studied the craft. Not all of them took classes or read books about writing, but they still studied the craft in one way or another, even if only by reading works they admired and paying attention to what worked and didn't work for them. Yes, insidious, isn't it, this thing they call learning? If you truly love something, you may not always be aware that you're studying it. Read more about The importance of craft and significant detail in fiction