How Frank Zappa Saved My Life

I didn’t get many visitors in the hospital after my first suicide attempt.  I was mostly too embarrassed to see my friends.
But two of the coolest guys I knew showed up, Andy and Mark, and they gave me precisely what I needed – to show up and shoot the shit with me.  I felt like a broken doll, but needed to be treated like a human being, and they kept the solicitous “…You okay?” questions to a minimum.
They were the first to make me laugh.
And I remember very clearly when they didn’t make me laugh.  Because Mark said there was a Zappa song that referenced me, and Andy put a hand on his arm and said, “Come on, man, don’t reference that, he’s not ready.” And I asked what song, and they demurred me, saying they’d tell me later.
A couple of weeks later that summer, when I got out of the hospital, I asked them to play whatever that song was for me.  And they bobbed their heads, embarrassed, and got out the tape and played the first Frank Zappa song I ever heard:
“Suicide Chump.”

You say there ain’t no use in livin’
It’s all a waste of time
‘N you wanna throw your life away, well
People that’s just fine
Go ahead on ‘n get it over with then
Find you a bridge ‘n take a jump
Just make sure you do it right the first time
‘Cause nothin’s worse than a Suicide Chump
They watched my face, horrified –
And I burst out in laughter.  Who the hell would say that?
“What else did he write?” I asked, thinking that Zappa was a guy like Tom Lehrer – all clever lyrics embossed over bog-standard tunes.  And they grinned and said, “Oh, you’re in for it,” because they knew what I didn’t – that song was among the most uninteresting tunes in the Zappa archive, a simple blues riff.  They knew that Zappa had complex polyrhythms that would get wedged in your brain for days but be impossible to play.
They unveiled You Are What You Is to me, and the top of my head blew off.
The thing about Zappa is that he was fearless in every direction – he’d make fun of anything.  (His first album notably pierced the hypocrisy of the hippie movement, in 1966.)  He hit conservatives and liberals with the same incisive glee, and nothing was sacred.
Yet he did so with a cold intellect.  He’d go dumb on purpose, sliding into dippiness because it amused him, but always Zappa would retreat to that high ground of thoughtfulness and he would not abandon it.
But he was also fearless musically, striding boldly into every territory to grab orchestral music from over here and doo-wop music from there and a snatch of heavy metal and then weld them all together with complexity that made his musicians have to do actual work.  He’d snag the most talented drummers and guitarists and keyboardists of his generation, and they would have to work ten-hour days to figure out how to play what he wrote.  Touring with Zappa became like graduating Juilliard – you couldn’t do it without a magnificent set of skills.
Yet for all that, his music never felt as studied as the prog rock movement, which often felt like they were doing crazily-hard stuff just to show that they could do it.  Zappa’s work, with rare exceptions such as The Black Page, felt organic – yes, the diabolical stuff was in there, but felt like it had a purpose.  It was singable.
And so Zappa saved my life.
Because Zappa showed me it was okay to be weird, so long as I kept observing.  He followed his dream so recklessly that he didn’t really give a crap about his fans, or the record companies, or even his musicians – he just wanted to explore whatever was interesting to him.
What interested Zappa was dissection.  He liked looking at things.  He liked tinkering with both ideas and notes.  I liked tinkering with ideas and words.  He liked changing styles, and I liked changing styles.  He hated pretentiousness for the sake of looking good for other people, treasuring honest exploration –
So that’s what I set out to be.
Zappa told me it was okay for me to be me, and maybe even Zappa wouldn’t approve of me, but that was okay.  The core message of Zappa was that he was living for his own amusement, and he didn’t give a fuck what you thought because he enjoyed what he did –
Which gave me permission to be weird.  And not the kind of performative weird I saw so much in high school, that Hey, look at how kooky I am guys, do I make you laugh? but the actual weird that comes from looking at things that nobody thinks should be cool and hugging them to your chest.
To this day, it’s hard to describe what I like musically.  I’m all over the map.  People hate my mix tapes.  Because I’ve got so many loves and they don’t have much in common except they called to me.  (It’s also why I have such a hard time whenever someone asks me what my literary influences are.)
And there were a couple of times I was tempted to commit suicide from then on, back when I was young and still working through what would eventually come to be known as my Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I thought of Zappa: Do you want to be a suicide chump?
I eventually came to realize that some significant portion of my suicides were, indeed, performative.  (The other portion was needing a vacation, which I came to realize suicide was not.)  And if Zappa wouldn’t feel sorry for me, then others wouldn’t, and if I was going to make a show out of my death then why would I do that for such an unappreciative audience?
Zappa’s one of the major reasons I’m here today.
And I think of David Bowie dying, and I see all the outpouring of love for him because for so many people, he was the first person who told them, “You can be yourself.”  They saw someone blazing their own path fearlessly, and they realized they could create their own life.  And to have that inspiration go away so suddenly, so unexpectedly, made them remember how much of their life was only possible because one person had been so unimaginably brave.
Their sorrow calls to mine.  Their grief is fresh; I lost my hero twenty-three years ago, in 1993.  I know this because I have a Frank Zappa print in my bathroom, right over the toilet – I’m pretty sure he’d have laughed at that – that marks his demise.  I think of him almost every day.
And in a sense, it’s good that Zappa’s gone.  He was already getting cranky, and I suspect he would have become insufferable in his later life – maybe he would have remained a hero, maybe his humor would have boiled away to leave him with nothing but arrogance and he would pucker into some Richard Dawkins-shaped asshole on Twitter.
But I don’t know. Zappa evolved a lot. It was exciting to see where he’d go.
And Bowie is gone, and Zappa is gone, and all our heroes must march into the sky eventually.  It’s a day of mourning for those beautiful freaks who found a different hero.
But we all marched down the same path, basically.  You and I, Bowie fans, we both had that moment where a man shook us by the shoulders and said, You don’t have to be this.  And pointed down a more limitless direction.
You.  Me.  Zappa.  Bowie.  We’re all part of the spectrum.
We all became our own heroes.  At least a little bit.
That bravery serves everybody, in time.
So be weird. Be bold. Be as big as your heroes, even if they’re gone. That’s what they would have wanted of you, and it’s the blessing I wish upon you, on a day that still feels a little colder and emptier than it should.

How Many Brilliant GMs Have We Lost To This Writing Biz?

After months of playing evil vampires, I have agreed to step back up again and become DM for my gaming group.  They’ve been asking me to.  We stopped right in the middle of a very exciting plot twist in my Numenera campaign, and I know vaguely where it’s going…
I hope I won’t punk out on them this time.
But it’s hard to GM these days, because as it turns out my GM headspace lives right in the middle of my novel-writing headspace.  I plot my novel in my empty spaces: when I’m walking the dog, I’m marking out the beats for this epic soup-making action sequence I’ve got planned. When I’m driving long distances, I have conversations in-character, mapping out dialogue paths through the epic soup-making action sequence.  When I’m in the shower, I’m envisioning the tiny details of soup-making – what the bowl feels like in my hands, trying to master the little tidal shifts in a five-gallon pot.
All that primes the pump so when I eventually sit down to write that epic soup-making action sequence, it’s as good as I can make it.
(NOTE: You may think I’m kidding. I’m not. I am actually writing an epic soup-making action sequence.  Well, consomme, to be precise.)
Anyway, the issue is that most of the good bits of my novel are created when I’m not staring at a screen… and the same can be said for my GMing.  I plot out campaigns on my walks, on my drives, in the showers.
Switching modes doesn’t work. I can really only novel-plot or GM-plot.  Not both.
So my campaigns have suffered for some time now, ever since I’ve started writing (and selling) novels. I don’t have this problem with short stories; short stories don’t require me to keep an entire world juggled in my head the way that both games and novels do.  When I wrote short stories, I could switch modes easily, because short stories aren’t exactly easy but they are compact.
The thing is, I’ve gamed with Cat Valente, author of the Fairyland books, and I know that she’d make an awesome GM… but she also has the same issue of “novels vs. GMing, novels win.”  Mike Underwood, who writes the Genrenauts series, experiences the same problem.
In my ideal world, GMing would be its own financial career path, where the really good GMs were stars – maybe not Brad Pitt-level stars, but MC Lars-level stars where they have 20k followers and earn a nice living off of merch and video streams.  And in that world, novelists would have a lot of overlap of skills – no, you don’t get to control the characters precisely, but there’s a lot of related talents in worldbuilding and character tension and plotting and motivation that get hauled out when you’re a top-tier GM.
And I wonder how many novelists could run awesome long-term campaigns – not the one-shots you occasionally get at ConFusion, but those epic months-long games where you have character development and get hooked into the world because you’re both in it and changing it.
I dunno.  I know the world often loses me as a DM.  And I’m sad I never got to sit in a Cat Valente campaign.  And I’m sad that GMing isn’t more valued, because god damn there’s a lot of great sci-fi and fantasy writers I’d love to see behind the screen.
 
 

Read One Of My Favorite Stories, Over At Apex Magazine!

“Riding Atlas” is one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever written, in a career of writing weird fucking stories.  And I’ve had some people call this one “weirdly erotic,” which I didn’t exactly intend, but I guess you write about anything bodily-intimate and people respond.
Hey, I’m happy to be a springboard for all kinks.
Anyway, “Riding Atlas” is over at Apex now, and it starts like this:

They were naked, now, on a dirty mattress.
“Neither of you have eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours?” Ryan asked, hauling equipment into the room: sloshing plastic buckets, packs of hypodermic needles, coils of tubing, straps. “And no drugs in your system? This is a pure trip. Just two bloods commingling. Any impurities stop Atlas from getting inside you.”
Stewart didn’t answer. He was too distracted by all the naked couples. The attic’s flooring was covered with bodies, lying belly to swollen belly on bedbug-blackened box-springs. Their arms were thrust out above their heads, ears resting on their biceps; they clasped hands like lovers, their circulatory systems knitted into a single bloodstream.
Stewart felt his arms itch where the needles would be inserted, anticipation and fear churning into a sour mix in his gut. But Tina was ready, as she always was for things like this. She’d dragged him here, telling him they had to do this now, before they outlawed consanguination just like they’d outlawed LSD….

Go read the rest. If you can.
 

Trust Your Gut Instinct.

If you’re out on a date, and get that flutter of “STRANGER DANGER” jolting its way through your nerves, then you need to pay attention to that and cut this date off right away. Because your natural instincts know better than you do, and it’s time to start acting on those hunches.
You know when you’re in trouble. You just don’t know you know.
And if you’re out on a date and feel unloved, and your instincts tell you the best way to solve this is to have a crazy breakdown in public so her protective instincts will kick in and you’ll know how much she adores you, then it’s time to huddle up against a wall and tell her you can’t do this! Follow those impulses! You –
Wait. That’s bad advice?
Okay, I’m gonna level with you: About half of you need to pay attention to your instincts, because you folks do have good instincts, and you’re not listening when the alarm systems start blaring “ABUSER.” Chances are good you had such good instincts that an abuser in your distant past muffled them to make you more compliant, and it’s time to start listening.
But the other half have terrible instincts that make them feel all warm and fuzzy when someone subtly mistreats them with a feisty round of negging, or have instincts that tell them to do horrible selfish things when they feel bad, or even have instincts that make them homing missiles for the worst and most self-destructive relationships.
So you know what? As usual, universal advice fucks over a lot of people.
Here’s the truth: if you’re not sure yet, pay attention to your instincts. Write ’em down, if you need to. Then go along with ’em and see what happens.
You might be the sort of person whose instincts get them out of jams, in which case, hell yeah, follow those instincts! Pay more attention! Activate those instinct-sensors! Lift instinct-weights until you have the confidence to speak the fuck up when something triggers the DANGER WILL ROBINSON part of your brain!
Or you might be the kind of person who, like me, has Darwin-destruction instincts that lead them to walk into blazing bonfires of drama – in which case you need to put a ball-gag on those instincts, and work overtime to develop artificial habits that compensate for this anti-consigliere in your brain who consistently advises you into ruin.
And after you’ve done that for a while, you might find that you have really good instincts for some things and really terrible instincts for others, at which point, shit, you gotta break it down and determine which category you’re in before following or running away from those subliminal impulses.
The point is that all advice is two-sided, and can wreck you if you listen to the wrong advice. “Speak up!” you say to a shy person, but the local friendless Donald Trump fan just heard you and he’s gonna talk louder now because clearly nobody’s listening. “Learn to trust people!” you say to someone who shoves everyone away, but the person who falls in love with the checkout clerk has heard you and they’re now justifying quitting their job to move in with someone on the second date. “Be yourself!” you say to the person who spends all his time quashing himself down to fit in, but Mister “I don’t bathe because that’s robbing me of my germ resistance” is giving you a thumbs-up from his reeking seat on the subway.
It’s not about getting advice. It’s about getting the right advice.
Learn to listen properly, man. And that’s literally the best advice I can give you.

A Brief Discussion Of Star Wars Costumes.

So I was thinking about the lack of imagination in the prequels versus the Force Awakens.  And some of that’s evident in the costumes.
Because I just saw a picture of Obi-Wan… and he’s wearing basically the same outfit in the prequels that he wears in A New Hope.  Which implies that Obi-Wan basically has dressed the same for, well, his entire fucking life.  He retreated to Tatooine as part of a secret mission, wearing what are clearly fucking Jedi robes in retrospect, and Lucas didn’t care because, well, the characters weren’t what he cared about.
How ridiculous is it that someone would wear the same outfit for seventy years if he wasn’t some sort of bizarre cartoon character or performer?  Especially if he went into hiding?
Whereas Han Solo is wearing his smuggler’s outfit in The Force Awakens – except on each rewatch, it seems a little more ridiculous.  He’s supposed to be a little sad for going back to his old smuggler days – and I think of a fashion show I watched that said, “People wear what they wore when they felt the most sexy.” And a lot of that show, which was devoted to helping people dress better, was about making them realize that it was a little sad to wear that outfit that no longer suited you.
He looks a little itchy in that outfit.  And it’s the exact same outfit, down to the belt buckle. Which makes us happy as Star Wars fans, but the script itself seems to indicate that being a smuggler really doesn’t suit Han any more – he just doesn’t know what to do with himself, and is trying to recreate his old magic by dressing up in a costume and hoping that hey, the good feelings will return.
Leia, you may note, is wearing a different outfit.  That’s because Leia’s a little wiser.
As is, I think, this movie.

How Many Stories Does A Character Have To Tell?

When we got out of Star Wars, my daughter was ablaze with all the things she wanted to see in the Star Wars Universe.  “We don’t know how {$CHARACTER} got Darth Vader’s helmet,” she said.  “I bet that’s an interesting tale. And how did {$CHARACTER} get ahold of that lightsaber?  Wow, how did that happen?”
I was quiet, because she was so excited.  But deep down, I was thinking, That’s just logistics.  Those aren’t stories. 
And last night I watched Creed, the latest movie in the Rocky series, for the second time – and it’s amazing how much more attention to pay to sequels and reboots when you’re writing the third book in a series.  Now, whenever I watch a sequel, I have that tickle in the back of my head, knowing that if sales hold up maybe they’ll ask for a fourth book in the ‘Mancer series.
 
And while I love Rocky with all my heart, every Rocky fan knows that there’s only two really good movies in the original series – the first Rocky, where our lovable lunk becomes a contender, and the third Rocky, where he suffers from PTSD after being beaten out of his comfort zone.  (And arguably Rocky Balboa, which feels more like a fond coda than a series finisher.)
The other movies exist.  Things happened in them.  But they don’t stick in the fans’ minds because what happens in those films are retreads.  Rocky II is basically Rocky I, except with a slightly happier ending.  Rocky IV is Rocky III, except with an even more cartoonish villain.
Rocky learns the same lesson in II that he does in I.  Rocky learns the same lesson in IV that he did in III.
There’s only so many significant lessons a man can learn in life.
And I think of Batman, and how many thousands of comics devoted to Batman stories have been written, and most of them were fine – they existed, Batman beat a villain, and they slid into the massive vat of Batman stories to be quietly forgotten.  They were exciting at the time, but Batman either didn’t learn a lesson beyond Here’s How To Beat The Riddler This Time, or he learned a lesson very much like what he’d learned before – Batman Will Always Be Alone, or Batman Needs His Allies, or Batman Must Not Kill.
Stories that didn’t tell us anything new.
So we liked them when we were reading them, but they didn’t stick.
There are a handful of great Batman stories, and it’s not surprising that those are the ones the movies gravitate towards – Batman is crippled and must work his way back to greatness.  Batman encounters a man who tries to seduce him into abandoning his world view.  Batman battles old age as he struggles to remain relevant.  And, of course, Batman’s origin.
Those are the real stories.
And the trick is, Batman can’t have too many of these significant lessons, because then Batman stops being Batman.  If Batman learns that killing is, actually, more efficient, then he’s suddenly not the guy we can market on lunch boxes. If Batman learns that channelling his great wealth into social programs is more efficient, then Batman as we know him is over.
Truth is, most characters have only a handful of lessons they can be taught before they become something so different, they evolve into people who weren’t what we were drawn to.
Yet audiences want to hear stories about the people they love.  They want to warm their hands by Batman, and Rocky, and Sherlock Holmes, and all the other great characters, and publishers want to make money, so they ask authors, “Hey, can you have them do something so the fans can tag along with this person for a while?”
So what you get are what I call potboiler tales – they exist because you’re happy to go back to see Spidey fighting Doc Ock again, but they’re just going to shuffle deck chairs around.  Maybe Spidey will have lost a power or two, but he’s lost them before.  Maybe Aunt May will be in trouble again, but that old biddy’s always been his boat anchor.  Maybe Spidey will, once again, have some mundane commitment he’s missing out on while he saves the day, and will pay the price in his personal life for being a hero.
Again; nothing we haven’t seen before.  And we’ll give Spidey new villains, and more events, and maybe a new girlfriend…
And once every decade or two, an author will stumble upon a tale that does teach Spidey a lesson we haven’t seen before, something fitting and new, and fans will talk about how brilliant it was, and it’ll revitalize interest in Spidey in a way that no crossover or revolving-door-death ever will.
That will be the next of Spidey’s significant stories.  It’ll take its place in the pantheon.
And slowly, that will become another one of the Lessons Spidey Must Learn, and we’ll see the same endless churning of Spidey stories except that’ll be incorporated into the repertoire.
There’s nothing wrong with potboiler tales, naturally.  I read a billion of ’em when I was a kid, and they did me just fine.  And they’ll probably show {$CHARACTER} getting Darth Vader’s helmet, and they’ll bolt in some character arc somehow, and it’ll be a good story that will satisfy people who already liked Star Wars.
Yet as an author, I note that people respond to the significant stories much better.  They’ll watch Rocky II.  They’ll remember Rocky III.  They’ll watch Star Trek III, but they’ll remember Star Trek II.
But as an author, at this point, I want only the significant stories.  I want the ones where a character goes into the tale as one person, and comes out as another person entirely.  And my point is that even the great characters only have a couple of those significant tales they can live through before they’re done evolving.
(And in some cases companies don’t want the significant tales to be written, because in the end with Star Wars the big changes have to happen on-screen, and you can’t have Rey’s big moments taking place on paper when the celluloid is what grabs the big bucks.)
My wife likes reading the potboilers.  I support her in this.  Yet I think in her heart of hearts, she’s searching for the next great significant story.  One will provide nutrition to get you through the day; the other is a meal.
And I think that if you’re a writer, you can poison yourself on potboilers when it comes time to tell your own original stories.  In general, the potboilers work for people who already liked this stuff.   And stealing too many techniques from the potboilers risks telling a story that doesn’t have enough muscle to grab people by the lapel and lift them off the ground.
When you’re writing a tale, maybe consider whether this is potboilerish or significant for your main characters.  Ask if this is the critical incident in their lives.
And if it’s not, maybe figure out what would be.  Because god damn, people thirst for that significance, even if they don’t necessarily know they want it.

Some Advice To Middle-Aged Writers Who Wish To Make A Living Off Of Writing

Yesterday, Robert Jackson Bennett posted some pretty wise words for aspiring professional writers – advice that boiled down to “Get a full-time job, manage your career, and write part-time.”  Because writing full-time a) takes years to pay off, b) is uneven with the cash flows even when it does succeed, and c) lacks health insurance.
However, he was then asked: “That’s for kids in their early twenties.  What if I’m an old fogey?”
I am an old fogey, so let me speak.
I published my first novel last year at the age of 45 – I am now legally obligated to tell you that novel is called Flex, and Mr. Bennett was kind enough to read it and give it a nice blurb so I could sell it to people. I got serious about writing at the age of 38.
And yes, things are slightly different for you.
If you have reached late middle age without getting published in the ways you want, that’s likely due to one of two reasons:
1)  You suck at writing.
2)  You weren’t serious about writing.
The good news is, both can be fixed.
The “serious about writing” is a large issue – I wrote on and off for twenty years, leaving my stories in desk drawers because it was a lot easier hearing my friends tell me how awesome I was than actually, you know, getting rejected.  After decades of writing just often enough that I could tell my coffee dates that I was a writer, I realized that it was time to shit or get off the pot – I could die in the nursing home with my relatives fondly lamenting how much potential I had, or I could see whether I was actually any good at this.
And if you’re middle-aged and just starting writing because it seems like A Nice Thing To Do, here’s my best advice for you:
Decide whether you want to write because it’s A Nice Thing To Do, or whether you want to hurl yourself bodily into the meatgrinder that is publishing.
Writing because it’s A Nice Thing To Do is awesome!  The kids these days churn out tons of fanfic, and they have a lot of fun goofing around in someone else’s universe.  It’s the equivalent of playing hoops in your buddy’s back yard during the summer – maybe you get a little competitive, maybe you’re way better than the average ball-tossin’ schmuck, but the main goal is to have fun.
Writing professionally is not always fun.
If you want to go professional, well, you’re likely gonna get rejected a lot, and hear some mean shit said about you from people who are right to say mean shit about you because your story wasn’t good enough yet, and you have to suck it down and agree with these very-rude-yet-very-accurate snarlbacks in order to make your writing better, richer, smarter.
It’s a lot easier to toss off Avengers fanfic to people with low expectations and happy thoughts.
(Which is not to say that all fanfic is low-quality – it certainly is not, and Seanan McGuire would beat me senseless if I said that – but a lot of fanfic is basically people enjoying themselves and not trying to sell their fiction for enough money to pay the rent.  Which is a methodology I fully support.)
Older folks often forget that “writing for fun” is an acceptable option.  This doesn’t have to be Career Part 2.  You can get your poems published in magazines that pay nothing and have a hell of a time. Dork around and self-publish your first draft. Pay money for a nice cover.  Who cares if there’s cash or success in it?
You care?
Okay.  Time to get serious, then:
You probably suck.
This isn’t a fatal flaw; I sucked for decades.  But if you’re older, and you’ve been working on your fiction for years and still that breakthrough eludes you, you’ve almost certainly got a couple of lazy habits clogging up your throat.  You may not even be aware that they exist.  But they’re stopping you from going further.
(And if me telling you that “you probably suck” gets your hackles up, holy God, let me tell you that this is perhaps the nicest thing you’ll have said to you when you’re starting out.  Consider the Nice Thing To Do route if that seriously ruffles your wings.)
If you wanna start writing, don’t quit your job.  Instead, learn to work in the time you have and figure out why you suck.  (For me, it was stiff plotting and bad prose.)  You need to find people who can be honest about your fiction in realistic ways, not the puff-pastry of your buddies who are just impressed you finished a story, and have them kick your ass like fighters at a dojo.
What worked for me was a Writing Workshop.  I did two; Clarion, which was six weeks long, and Viable Paradise, which was a week long.  John Joseph Adams, a bigwig sci-fi publisher, discusses the various workshops available in this post here.
These workshops are expensive. Hopefully, your middle age has been accompanied by middle class, and your sole advantage among these young whelps is that you have a paycheck to go into hock for this shiz.  But they do help.
People will tell you that writing workshops are the only way to get good at writing, and those people are so full of shit their T-shirts are one big brown skidmark.  But Tobias Buckell, another writer of some note, once told me that the Clarion Workshop was like a time machine – it can accelerate your career four years forward in a couple of weeks.  Being critiqued heavily by professionals, and insightful students, will highlight all the issues in your text.
If you’re running out of time already, workshops help.
They are not panaceas, though.  The dirty secret of every writing workshop is that the people who succeed are usually the most tenacious, not the most talented.  I certainly wasn’t the best writer in either of my classes, but I got a novel published because I wrote every day and refused to stop.
But that’s the other beauty of a workshop; you get to spend a couple of weeks seeing what it’s like to be a Professional Writer.  And some people look at all the work that needs to get done, and the rejection, and the heartache, and the crapshoot terror, and they say Fuuuuuuuck this.  I’ve got better things to do with my life.
Which is great!  Man, seriously, if you can pay a couple of thousand bucks to discover that you don’t have to waste the next decade chasing a dream that doesn’t suit you, do it.  Sometimes, a workshop is a success because it’s shown someone that they could be a writer, but they would be miserable doing it.
Yet again, workshops aren’t necessary.  (RJB did no workshop, and he’s doing all right.)  They are merely convenient, assuming you can get into one.  And if you can’t, well, let’s go back to the “You probably suck” phase – you’ll need to find some local writers’ groups or good online forums that will rip your fiction apart constructively…
And you have to listen.  You’re not good yet.  You have to be this bizarre blend of egotistic and humble – humble enough to accept the bodyblow of “Whoah, that was awful” when it’s true, egotistic enough to shrug off the complaints that would steal the uniqueness from your work.  And that’s hard to know, man.  It’s hard.
Which isn’t to say this is the only way.  Writing is bizarre like that; some people pick up the pen at fifty, and they’re geniuses out the gate.  Others find these alternative paths I’ve never considered, and they’re successes.  When I say “Here is how to do it,” realize that it’s like climbing a mountain – this is the bunny trail I’m pointing out, but there may be a shortcut that gets you there faster, and if you’re super-dedicated you can probably scale the cliffs bare-handed.  Don’t let anyone tell you this is the sole path to publication.
But yeah.  You’re older.  You can still do this.  But you gotta put in the work.  And you’ve got less time.
I’d start now, if I were you.