It's Your Life. Are You Missing It?

Imagine if you were to create a painting or a sculpture.  Something of beauty.  Imagine feeling the medium in your hands…the coolness of the clay and it’s suppleness as it warms in your palms and fingers and becomes more pliable.  Feel it on your finger tips as you spread it, mold and cup it, getting it to bend smoothly to your vision of beauty….  Imagine the time it takes to get it just right.  Then the time it takes to fire it, if it must be hardened.  Imagine it finished.  Being admired by people for its beauty, it’s simplicity, it’s…youness….  Hear their ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhs’ as they compliment you on your vision and talent.

Or imagine the chalky odor of Gesso on a freshly stretched canvass.  And how acrid the paint smells as you twist off the smooth little plastic paint caps and create rich colorful globs of on a palette.   Little wells of glimmer and loveliness.  Hear the swishing as you start to apply the paint to the canvas.  Feel the brush in your fingers.  How long is it and what kind of bristles does it have?  How hard is it?  How long does it take to bring your vision to life?  Hours?  Days?  Months? Years?

Or maybe art isn’t your thing and you prefer food.  Maybe you get a creative urge to bake some sort of pastry and you mix a rich, silky batter by hand with a polished whisk until its shiny and glossy; full of divine cocoa or vanilla aromas.  Or maybe the scent of bitter orange and lemon rise through your nostrils and fill the space around you with their sweet, citrusy scent? 

Imagine how your masterpiece ribbons when you pour it from the slick mixing bowl into the baking pan.  How shiny it looks and how sweet and rich it smells. Imagine setting it in the oven protectively, the blast of warmth hitting your face as you set it in place.  The feel of the timer as you punch the buttons or twist the dial and set the countdown to your gastronomic ecstasy.  You are a God, forging your Opus with flame, sugar and flour: like Zeus shaping humans out of mud.  How your house fills with the sweet aroma as it blooms until finally you remove it from the oven.  You let it cool and frost it before presenting your masterpiece to the people you love: an offering of your creativity and joy.  Your inner desire to share what you are with others.

Now, imagine taking this beautiful piece of work that you invested your time and energy on.  That you invested your sense and sensual appreciation into.  That you conceived of, dreamed up and labored into being.  Imagine this thing that you made.  That came from you and your energy, your desires, your wishes and passions.  Imagine taking it and then throwing it into a public toilet.  Where the rich aromas of paint, clay or sugar and cocoa mingle with the stench of filth and excrement.  And imagine standing there in that public head and encouraging people to go into that stall and destroy your creation in the most foul and disrespectful way any human can.

Pretty absurd, right? Pretty awful. And yet we do this with our lives every day.  We take how many years to create the ultimate piece of art each of us has to showcase in the world: our lives, and we throw them in the toilet.  We sacrifice them to jobs that squelch the beauty out of us because we are told by social proof from the time we are children that this is what we must do.  We let teachers steal our gifts and friends convince us that we are less than we really are.  We settle for lovers who do not touch us or gaze into our eyes and say, “You are beautiful.”  We let doctors corrupt our understanding of heath.  We let TV feed us cynicism and dysfunction like geese being force fed for foie gras: in both cases the end being the same….  We drug ourselves on food and booze and superficiality until we are numb.

And what’s the result after we take our masterpieces and toss them in the can?

We isolate ourselves from each other. We close ourselves off with cynicism and anger. We talk only about ourselves and avoid making real connections with others.  We hold anyone who wishes to get to know us with contempt, because after all, we tossed out masterpiece in a fucking crapper, so what the hell could they possibly see in us?  We are suspicious and jaded and, goddamnit we like it that way!  Because, fuck it, we’re gonna show the world how much we hate it because, after all, it forced us to give up our beauty didn’t it?

Or did it?

I’ve said it before, to you, my friends.  Either in my books or blog posts, or even to some of you in person.  You cannot create beauty in this world if you are not willing to make the space for that that thing to be defended.  Whether it be our ideas, our art, our romance, enthusiasm, prosperity or hope.  You cannot create beauty and then throw it in the fucking trash, because it is worse than if you’d never even tried to make beauty to begin with.  And if you choose not to create beauty, right here, right now, in this world full of billions of people because the price is just too high to learn how to defend it: if you are choosing not to make that magical thing that can grow between people and animals and nature when beauty is present, then you are not only throwing your masterpiece away, but you’re pissing on what you were made for.

You may say, “But Hayden I’ve been hurt.”

To you I say, “What artist hasn’t been?”

“You are an artist. And your life is the beautiful thing you are creating. From great hurt can come great understanding and profound revelation about the nature of  what we are.  But only if you choose to see it that way; if you choose to remain open and childlike in your appreciation of the world.  

When I was a boy, I used look at around at people who claimed they wanted to be happy, to be in love and find romance, to be prosperous and enthusiastic and creative and I’d watch them push those things away every time they showed up in their lives.  Every chance they got to be happy, they chose victimhood, sadness and self-pity instead: because those things were easier.  They were familiar.

I used to say to a friend of mine back then, “Most people spend their lives just missing it.”  It was a horrifying thought, that propelled me to look further for answers.  It’s a thought that that I’ll leave you with now.  

And I’ll leave you with this bit of hope.  There are two big keys to gaining a life that full of romance, enthusiasm, prosperity and hope that I’m going to share with you now...  One is laughter, the other is sincerity.  If you can take those two clues I’ve given you and do something meaningful with them, nothing will stop you ever again.  Because they will lead to everything that’s really important in this world.

Are These Men Who Kiss Gay?!

When I was younger I struggled to published stories about men who loved other men.  It was very frustrating because I thought I had something valuable to say, but my words bounced off of publishers who didn’t want books about men who—god forbid—kissed each other or—even worse—overcame obstacles, found magic in the world and realized happiness.  I left writing and publishing for awhile because of that.  Then, with the birth of the new era of publishing I returned to writing and went back to creating the kind of stories I always wanted to create with the freedom of not having anyone else telling me how I had to do it.

It seems rather hypocritical now that many of those same people who wouldn’t touch the stuff I was writing back then have jumped on this new “gay fiction” trend. Ideas I came up with twenty years ago that I couldn’t sell then are now flooding the marketplace. Stories about men loving men are hot right now. The topic is on fire and seems very interesting to many.  

What’s also interesting is that, in many cases, the reasons for interest are superficial ones.  Physicality, identity and gender stereotypes abound: all of the things that keep people limited in their experience are the reasons why many people are attracted to the subject.  Those are OK subjects to cling to if you want to stay isolated, angry and anti-social, but we’re living in a world full of humans, who, the majority of which, don’t necessarily fit the tiny mold that each of us casts him/herself into.  At some point, we have to reach out past what we do in the bedroom or how we define ourselves on insurance forms and touch people (smiling wickedly) where we are similar.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying everyone does this.  Some people, like me, just want to read a good story and they love well-developed characters and a forbidden adventure, regardless of all that other garbage. I really don’t care that Yuko in xxxHolic was a woman, That Han Solo was a dude who dug chicks, or that River Tam in Firefly was a freakin’ basket case.  All of these characters kicked ass and went beyond human limitations to become examples of something heroic. And the people who understand that concept are the ones I write for.  

See, growing up my favorite stories were either fairytales, children’s adventure novels, or those written by writers  like John Irving who seemed to care about bigger issues than what someone did with their penis or a vagina.  Irving was great because he said shit like: “We invent what we love and what we fear…”; “Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you…”; and, “You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed…”  Those were things, I thought, worth saying, because they were things that, if understood, could change a life: any life.

But something very strange started happening to me after I wrote Year of the Bull and was working on Anatomy of a Wish.  People started asking me if Anatomy was going to be a, “gay novel.”  

That baffled me for two reasons.  First: I had spent so many years writing “gay stories” that no one gave a shit about.  And second, for years gay people have been begging everyone to take them seriously, to accept them as they are without conditions; and yet, the first thing we do when we demand everything or most things in our lives be labeled as “gay” is set up conditions.

It’s very telling that this stuff is going on in our stories.  Because our stories mirror our lives and our values.  And if you watch, you can see how those limits are playing out in our world. The isolation and confusion currently affecting people from the labels that we are constantly coming up with is astonishing.  The other day I saw someone refer to “the community” as LBGTQ.  A friend of mine was confused because they didn’t know what the Q stood for.  I had to confess I didn’t know either.  But then I wondered how many freaking initials we have to have to divide an already small group?  Are there enough letters in the alphabet to classify us by our flavor of hurt that we will ever be satisfied?  And when we are finally the LBGTQRSTUVHUNLOPFSCXZAC community will we finally be at peace or further dividing our identities by algebraic equations to keep the separation going?

Recently single again, I went with a friend to a bar the other night for the first time in like ten years.  When we were younger she and I went out all the time and we were always baffled by how hard  people worked at separating themselves from each other; but now, it’s almost hysterical the limits people are putting on themselves and trying to put on others. People kept asking us if I we were a couple.  I would look at them smile and say, “No, I really love men (And I’m pretty good at it.)  Is that…um…” *still smiling* “…OK?”  

They all crashed because they saw the genuine, non-sexual affection my friend and I had for each other and were confused by it.  (They were also confused by the passion I have for loving men: but then, passion seems to be a thing people are afraid of these days.)  But let me ask you: If we can’t have affection for each other that goes beyond gender and sex how can we ever expect to find the love we as humans claim to really want?

That same night, a dude we were talking to showed us his sparkly phone case and asked us if it was too gay?  Is that even possible? I mean—seriously, do the people who would judge anyone for having a sparkly phone case really matter in anyone’s lives?

I specifically chose to classify my books as “Urban Fantasy” because I wanted people to realize that they weren’t just about “gay people”.  Oh yes, men kiss in my books.  And some even have sex with each other if it’s important to what’s going on in the story.  But there are other characters in my books too.  And the new book I’m working on, The Particle, has a lot of characters who really don’t think pride parades are the highlight of the summer.   

There comes a point in your life when you really begin to understand the truth of the things you tell yourself as a kid when you’re coming out.  Love is Love.  People are people.  And there should be bigger experiences we try to aim for in art then how we can best label ourselves.  

The phrase, “Is it a gay book,” should be outdated.   If we can’t reach each other in our stories in ways that illicit romance, enthusiasm, hope and prosperity then we have no business claiming we’re artists.  Because those four things are what will bring about the kind of changes we need to see in the world now. If our art stops at gender, sexuality, and identity then we limit ourselves from the truly powerful experiences that awaken us to each other as humans like our ability to come together, heal each other and create unity and wholeness.

Those of you who’ve read Anatomy of a Wish know that I threw a curve ball into the gender thing.  That was on purpose.  Because I wanted people to start feeling the truth of what they are: that we are something bigger than these bodies we reside in and all the tiny labels we attach to them like travel stickers on a suitcase.  The connections we have to other people are more significant and at the same time more fragile than we have ever imagined.  And if we really want the things we say we do: love, respect, honor and a deep connectedness to others, at some point we have to stop looking at the superficial flesh and realize that we are something so much more than an “X” or “Y” community.  We are vessels for something that could become limitless.

The Top Ten Reasons Why College Writing Programs Will Annihilate Any Hopes You Had of Ever Being A Writer

The Top Ten Reasons Why College Writing Programs Will Annihilate Any Hopes You Had of Ever Being A Writer

By Hayden Chance

So you want to be a writer?  You should be.  Never have there been more opportunities for someone who wants to write to create fiction, publish it and sell it to an audience than in this current age of Amazon and eBooks. But if you're thinking that you haven’t succeeded so far because you need to enter a college writing program or get an MFA in fiction writing, maybe you should think again.  There’s nothing those programs will teach you that you can’t learn from just doing it. A writer is one who writes.  The more you write, the more you learn. Period. 

With over a decade of experience attending writing programs, then almost another decade teaching them, I’ve seen the ugly side of college writing departments and the fact is: they’re not really there to help you succeed as a writer.  They’re there to take your tuition check.  They get paid whether you succeed as a writer or not.  And very few of them have any real-world experience that will be of any help to you or your writing career.  

The best experience you can get is to get your work out in front of people who read.  Readers are the ones who determine which stories will be remembered and which ones will be forgotten.  Having a network of friends who read  and who are honest with you about your work is far more valuable to you than any professor will ever be.  Your friends want to see you succeed and be happy.  A professor really only wants you to acknowledge his or her supreme authority.

These are the secrets no one will tell you.

Number ten: Most college writing classes are more like group therapy sessions than dynamic environments for producing engaging and provocative work. Talking about your feelings is great.  Sometimes it’s even necessary, but that’s what good friends and families are for.  Honestly, is it really in the best interest of your writing career to take out thousands of dollars in student loans to sit in a circle and talk about other people’s relationship issues?  Some people who really don’t understand the difference between fiction and no-fiction like to write thinly veiled pieces about their current life difficulties and then ‘workshop’ them so that they can justify their life dysfunction.  They also tend to end up being the ones whose “stories” get the most attention in class.  Don’t believe me?  The first time you watch someone run out of the classroom crying because someone says they feel the protagonist in their first person narrative is not someone the audience can like or identify with will change your mind.

Number nine: College writing programs discourage the pace you need to keep to succeed as a writer.  The more actual books you sell, the greater your chances of being able make a living writing. You have a better chance selling more books if you have more books out there for people to buy.  That means, simply, you have to write a lot of books to sell a lot of books.  Producing two finished short stories or chapters in a fifteen week period is way too slow a pace to keep competitive in today’s fiction market.  You need to write a lot of solid, engaging work in short periods of time to build a reading audience that can support your career.  You cannot do that if you take four, five or even fifteen years to “workshop” a book, which most college writing programs happily encourage you to do.

Number eight: College writing programs encourage working on a story long after its vitality is gone.  Ever catch fireflies in a jar when you were a kid?  Well, writing is like that.   There is a limited time in which you can catch the spark before the dawn comes and all the glitter is gone.  If you don’t complete a book or story when it’s hot inside you, you will lose it.  Spending years on a book or story does a disservice to your creative impulse and drains it of all its freshness and vigor. Strike while the iron is hot is an apt cliché here.   A story that has gone cold because you’ve changed from who you were when you had your original impulse will lack integrity and seem disjointed to your reader.

Number seven: There’s more emphasis on ethnicity, gender and political correctness than on producing solid and engaging stories.  Sometimes the best stories and most engaging characters are the ones who break all of the social taboos and norms.  I’m not talking about perversions and kinky sex stories, which college writing programs seem to be adept at producing. (I once had to sit through a featured writer’s reading at a well-known Chicago arts college where a young man stood before a room full of people and read his excruciatingly graphic piece about a guy tying down and having sex with a deer.  There was no plot.  No story outside of the actual sex act.  He was honored by the department as a progenitor of excellent writing.)  No, I’m talking about the characters who aren’t afraid to be bad and break all social norms.  Those characters are usually the ones audiences love the most and, coincidentally, the ones who most easily offend college writing professors.  I have no problem with truly multi-cultural characters.  I don’t care if a character is white, black, gay, straight, woman or man, Japanese, Chinese or Māori so long as they aren’t stereotypes and do something.  Stories that try to be “edgy” by rambling on about gender, sexuality or ethnicity in lieu of a plot are insulting to a readers' intelligence.  

Number six: Writing programs discourage creativity with elitism.  There are only certain types of stories that college writing programs recognize as quality: those in the Literary Fiction genre.  The other stuff, you know, the stuff people actually want to read, is most often looked down upon in college writing programs as marginal or unsophisticated.  Openly asserting that you can only appreciate stories that fit into a narrow, academic pigeonhole is really a pretty superficial way of approaching writing and shows a lack of sophistication in the reader, not the writer.

Number five: Most writing professors have never actually finished, published or sold a book and yet they get paid to teach you how to do it.  Those few who have actually published have usually done so through their college writing department or university presses and have no idea how a writer actually goes about building an audience and selling his or her work.  It makes you wonder how they established themselves in the position of guru to begin with, doesn’t it?

Number four: College writing programs encourage writers’ block.  Where your mind  goes, your energy flows.  Not only do they always talk about writers’ block in college writing programs, which gets you to focus on being blocked rather than on producing work, but very few, if any of them, have any effective methods of conquering the block they install by constantly talking about it.  Writers need solid processes to enable creativity. Writing in a journal, which is the answer most college writing professors will give people about countering writers’ block, is not a solid process.  It’s a way to start a career as a diarist and diffuse an otherwise powerful story impulse that could grow into a novel if cultivated in the right process.

Number three: Writing programs encourage rewriting for the sake of rewriting.  There’s a dirty little secret that no one in the writing world wants to let anyone else know.  I’m going blow the lid off it right now.  You can actually write great work in a first draft.  I cannot count the number of student first drafts I read when I was teaching that were perfect just the way they were and only got worse the more they were fiddled with.  Most of the scenes I’ve written that have totally blown people away were either not rewritten or only slightly rewritten.  College writing programs constantly encourage you to second guess your work and rewrite it endlessly until what started as vibrant, passionate and engaging is self-absorbed and flat.  Just because you can rewrite something, doesn’t always mean you should.

Number two: If a writing professor doesn’t have anything constructive to say about your work, he will say something unproductive so that he doesn’t lose his position of authority.  There is nothing more detrimental to one’s position as writing teacher than a student whose work is so strong it needs no critique.  Often it happens that a young student proves to have more life experience and talent than his teacher.  When that happens, the teacher will invent all sorts of BS to make it look like the student needs to change something that should be left the fuck alone.  On those occasions many students in the class will join the teacher in trying to make that student feel inadequate when he or she isn’t.  The smart students will approach that young writer on the side and say something like: “Don’t listen to them. It’s great as it is.  Just publish it!”  Unfortunately, this can set up cognitive dissonance in the young writer’s mind that can do great damage to his or her psyche.  That damage never would have been there had he or she just avoided the whole college-writing program trap to begin with.

Number one: Writing programs will make you doubt your own talents and abilities.   I have a friend who was actually told by his white, male writing professor that he could not write stories about magic or magical realism because he wasn’t a black or South American woman.  My friend took the man’s words to heart for years before he finally realized such advice was complete and utter bullshit.  His use of magic in his fiction not only became the signature of his writing, but became the thing his readers relished about his work.  Which means his professor discouraged his true style because of his narrow-mindedness and limited vision!  Quite often a professor who has no eye for talent in others discourages the very thing that could make a writer great.  That is the number one reason to avoid such programs.  Why risk letting someone crush your dreams because they lack vision?  It’s just not worth it. 

What's Real Literature?

One thing I always find interesting about literature. The academic organizations like to talk about the need for diversity in literature. They laud the need for stories that contains characters who are women or gay or black or disabled, etc. The academic organizations also like to think they are the gatekeepers of great art. But they're not. They only praise what's safe.

Comic books did all that decades ago. Not only did they have powerful and heroic characters like the Black Falcon or Professor X or Jean Gray or even malcontents like Lobo and Hellboy: but, they didn't apologize for them. People need heroic characters to aspire to and look up to or they become dark and self-centered. We could learn a lot from comics, and fairytales and sci-fi and anime: all the art that academia calls "marginal" or "immature".

Schools seem to like stories about slaves or slavery. But humans need stories about people who are free. Maybe, just maybe, the schools got it all wrong. Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted to get it all wrong.

Anatomy of a Wish Hits the Top New Urban Fantasy Bestsellers List!

Nothing like waking up on a Tuesday to discover you've achieved your lifelong goal of becoming a bestselling novelist....  Thanks to everyone who has already purchased Anatomy of a Wish.  And for those of you who haven't bought it yet: thank you in advance for remembering to by it.  :D  You can get it on Amazon.com, Smashwords.com and it will soon be on all the other e-reading devices.

New Novel release!!!!

Anatomy of a Wish will be released (Trumpet Flourish!!!!) On Monday, September 9. Thanks to all of you awesome readers who have been patient these last couple of weeks. I have the best readers in the world ;D Cheers to you guys, and here's hoping it was worth the wait!

 

 

 

 

Anatomy of a Wish

The new cover from the forthcoming novel from Hayden Chance, entitled, Anatomy of a Wish.  It's his fourth novel from Dorje Publishing.   What do you guys think?