Author: Jacob Swift

Swift is a US Postman, writer, RPG player, husband, and father, based in a small town in Louisiana. After ten years of not seeking publication, he’s decided to try again. In the meantime, he works a manual labor job and cares for his family. This blog site is a spot for him to put his notes and thoughts down, as well as brag about his family’s accomplishments.

Stuck in a storm, so might as well write.

I’ll usually be the first one to tell you that I don’t care if I get rained on, but if you’ve ever been around me during bad weather, you’d think I take this idea to some level of insanity. I never carry an umbrella unless the family is with me, and it’s for their sake, not mine. The moment I realize that a storm is imminent, I accept the fact that I’m going to look and feel like a drowned Louisianian rat and get on with the day.

That said, I’m also very aware of my mortality when a thunderstorm rolls over. This is due to an experience gained several years ago, on the job and in fact, on the very road I’m stuck on at the moment. I was parked by a utility pole during a thunderstorm and forgot the very basic of storm-survival knowledge: utility poles with transformers are prime targets when there’s lightning. A bolt struck the transformers and exploded, my world went white for a couple seconds, and I was picking myself up off the ground a few seconds after that.

Since then, I’ve made a policy that I can deliver the mail in any weather, but if the lightning is close by, I’m going to sit down and wait for about 10 minutes and let the worst pass me. Thus, we have today’s little shared moment with a mailman.

This isn’t really bad for Louisiana, but I’ll scamper for shelter when electricity is flying around.

So, while Zeus and Thor have their airborne spat, I’m sitting here going over my self-motivations to write, or rather berating myself for not doing as much writing as I’d like in several months. I think I’ve averaged about 200 words in a day, when it can happen at all. It’s understandable, really. The career is time and energy intensive, and my family has the ultimate priority in my mind. If given the choice between sitting at my tablet as soon as I get home and talking to the children, I’ll usually pick the latter. That the choice is presented to me when I sit down at my desk, in front of my tablet, is irrelevant and you can’t say otherwise.

I know what I need to do. I need to go back to my old disciplinary methods. Set up reminders to write when the kids go to bed. Have the coffee pot ready to brew when story-time is about to start. Stay away from the beer until I’ve made my goal for the day.

Alas, these things have been forgotten or ignored in the last three months. The mail volume increased, the kids discovered 8PM and decided it was a better time to go to bed, and I really like having a beer when I get home, for all I know it’s going to knock me out at 10 and I’ll wake up in my chair, Microsoft Word open and blank, and my knees hurting.

This is not a note of despairing my writing time, but rather my inner monologue getting an audience. Yes, I can do the things to get back into the swing of things. Also yes, I’m human and do have limits, even though I didn’t know them in my 20’s.

As the “heavy rain” shuffles off and thunder rolls away, I’m getting my satchel and heading out into the wet route. Just another few miles. Then I’ll get home, see to my evening chores, brew coffee, and write.

Just keep this in mind: ultimately we are the ones who will get our stories out, and it does take self-discipline to do so. Don’t slack off too much or you’ll be annoyed at yourself. More annoyed, anyway.

Y’all stay safe out there.

Godspeed, Buster.

As a mailman, I’ve met many, many dogs on my route, and my favorite route-dog died. Buster was a 15-year old bastard. He hated everyone. He hated me, his owners, his food bowl, a nearby leaf. If it existed within Buster’s line of sight, it was an object of his singular displeasure.

He growled at me every day for 8 years, and let me pet him only once. To be fair, he most likely didn’t know he was being petted, as he was staring off into space when I dropped off letters and scratched his ears for him. He did eventually look up at me and gave a threatening “get off my lawn” growl.

Goodspeed, Buster. You insufferable asshole. I’ll miss you.

On returning to a favorite genre for something old-fashioned

Science Fiction remains my all-time favorite story genre. I mostly blame that on being exposed to Star Wars at a very young age, and the choice of books in those years only confirms that.

Like any kid of the 90’s, I discovered Animorphs and became an obsessed reader. I had confirmed my weirdness in the fifth grade among my classmates for knowing these stories better than the St. Michael the Archangel prayer in Religion class (Catholic school for the win!).

Thank you, K.A. Applegate, for giving us all one hell of a story.

In that same year, I also discovered the Star Wars Expanded Universe, with a used and ratty copy of Darksaber.

I don’t care what the younger folks say, THIS is the Darksaber I know!

It was with this novel that I learned that the movies I knew and loved were being given new life, and also about how space battles were fought. I learned that I was intrigued by struggles in deep space, with giant crafts looming over each other and small fighter craft zooming around trying to get an advantage for their side. I learned that I loved the political aspect of opposing sides, and needed stories to give the POV of the antagonist. But mostly, it was giant ships hammering at each other that got my attention.

(Also, this particular story’s premise is hilarious when you think about it, and the climax makes you laugh more than get excited.)

Since then, I’ve always browsed the Science Fiction section of any bookstore I’d come across. When Fantasy was lumped into the same area as Science Fiction, I accepted it. I loved those stories too, so I saw it was an opportunity to stay in my favorite area of the store. I found Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, On Baslisk Station by David Weber, Battlestar Galactica by Glen A. Larson and Robert Thurston, and the grandfather of science fiction literature, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

I went out looking for science fiction stories and read everything I could get my hands on, back in those days. It was a love, pure and simple, and it’s stayed with me over the years.

So, let’s step into more recent days. We’re on a family/work vacation in Florida, and my wife tells me that I need to have a couple hours to myself in the city. She knows I don’t like crowds and am a introverted nerd, so she tells me the thing that always excites me: “You can go into a bookstore and get whatever you want.”

Pure. Fucking. Heaven.

I did make a few purchases (been wanting to start building my manga collection) but I found out that I could not find the one thing I knew would satisfy my old addiction. I could not find a book series (starting book, at least) that was a good and old-fashioned science fiction. I wanted starship combat, I wanted explosions in the void of space, I wanted Captains and Admirals arguing strategy and having fights with their subordinates over it.

I was denied my fix and that made me twitchy.

Some days later, I was talking with my regular buddy about this situation. He’s pretty understanding about having a particular niche in preferred reading, so he’s a good shoulder to cry on when you can’t find what you want. However, he also knows I’m trying to be an author, so he hits me where it hurts.

“If you can’t find the story you want, why not write it yourself?”

I have to admit, I’m terrified of the concept. Yes, I’d love to see such a story back on the shelves, but I get that it’s not popular these days. But still, he had a point. What if the story idea still had attraction to readers? Could I make such a story worthwhile enough for them to pay for it?

I honestly do not know, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited enough to give it a try.

Time for some short stories!

I know it’s not good to hold on to ideas that don’t make the cut when it comes to publishing, but I want to make one specific argument on keeping rejected stories: they’re just damn fun to write.

I don’t honestly know how to look at a story idea and not have multiple stories attached to the one idea. When I sent out my submissions, I had planned on building them into more than one short story. In one case, I wanted to write a series of short stories that followed a single narrative. But the submissions did not make the cut with the publisher, so they’ve just been sitting in my Documents folders, gathering digital dust.

I do plan on reworking the story ideas into other ideas, but that’s a ways down the line. For now, I just want to enjoy the ideas as they are, and I’d like other people to them. So, I’m adding on to my Story Writing page!

I have one series in particular that I’ve always wanted to work on, plus a few fan-fics that are just fun story ideas to play with. When I finish a chapter or a short story, I’ll put them up here for perusal.

Short stories, novel progress, and notes for next project

It may just be an example of an ADD mind taking a creative twist, but I have been busying myself with short stories and writing notes on other novels instead of just writing the novel. Unfortunately, I had come across a major problem to the story and it forced me to remove a large chunk of the work.

Why, do you ask? Simply put, I had made a decision for the character that she would never make, and continued writing as if the decision were normal. It wasn’t until I had gone nearly two chapters ahead when I noticed that the story wasn’t progressing or fitting with the outline I had done for the book. After thinking about it, I went looking and sure enough, I had made a simple mistake that cost me 9,000 words and three weeks of work. Needless to say, I haven’t been terribly happy with this outcome.

(A polite way of saying I’ve been pissed off about it and trying to figure out how to use ANY of that work.)

While I’ve been going over those pages and comparing them to the outline, I’ve been trying my hand at different writings, if just to keep my brain working properly. On one end, I write with the clear intention of getting paid for my work. I do want to entertain but I also really want to keep putting food on my childrens’ plates. With that in mind, I’ve been coming up with short stories and submitting them. So far, I haven’t had any hits yet, but I’ve received a lot of good criticism on my submissions. Actual critiquing from the editors, not just being ignored or told ‘this doesn’t fit the market right now’.

(It might show my age when my complaint about submissions is being utterly ignored instead of being told ‘no’, but let’s move on)

Writing short stories is some hella-good writing exercise for me. While not published, I’ve mostly written novels. I’m used to thinking my stories at novel-length, so condensing a story to 10,000 words or less? That takes work. There’s so much I want to show in the worlds I create, but if it’s not relevant to the actual story, it has to either be put aside completely or told in such a way that the reader can accept it within their suspension of disbelief. If you’re a short-story professional and you’re reading this, know that I am in utter awe of your abilities.

(Sidenote: No, I will not put my old novels up anywhere for people to read. The last one I wrote was in my early 20s, and it was horrible. Please don’t ask; I can only cringe so much before my face starts hurting.)

On the other end, I’ve been putting my recent education via Deborah Chester’s “Fantasy Fiction Formula” while working on notes for the next projects. While I’d love to have a long-running series of the current project, “Post-World Postmen” could easily be a one-shot novel to be put on the shelves. The other projects could function between 5 and 10 books, if I wrote them well enough and they were picked up. One such project is my latest attempt at writing urban fantasy (one of my favorites because it is very-much-so a genre that I find difficulty writing) and another is a very basic superhero story taken with an odd angle. When Post-World Postmen is finished, I’ll be tackling these stories while begging agents to take my book to the publishers.