Sunday, March 17, 2024

Having finished Children’s Crusade…

Just finished writing The Children’s Crusade. Still in shock.

The story clocked out at roughly 55,000 words. Got the first 50,000 words in at the old NaNoWriMo pace, not even intending to, just trying to get the story done during Lent, but the writing just flowing, the urgency of getting it done…

I hadn’t written something this long in about a decade. Recently I’ve tackled a lot of projects just getting the instinct back to par, and I guess it worked. Everything else I wrote, it culminated here. It was a story I outlined in the spur of the moment last year, and intended to write this year, and last month I started and this month it’s actually done. A lot of what I’ve written recently, there were significant breaks, even if at times I “caught up.” This time every time I “caught up,” I just got further and further ahead.

Until I reached this point. I hadn’t written since Tuesday, since hitting the NaNo mark, and I honestly didn’t know when I was going to write again. Lent still has two weeks, after all. I didn’t write yesterday, or this morning, and until I was actually writing I thought it would be the same this afternoon. And then it just happened. 

So all that feels good.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Having begun Children’s Crusade…

Having begun writing The Children’s Crusade, it reminds me all over again the rush of writing, of really writing, of the ideas coming fast and furious, how to write the story, how it’s different from when you’re only planning, how the story seems to write itself…

This is how I define being a writer. It’s not just writing or even selling actual books (although that would certainly be nice, too), but the thrill of the experience, of tackling the project, of knowing there’s a long way to go, but I can get there because I know how to get there, and I know it’ll be worth it, even if no one reads it ever, because the story is the thing, and it takes on a life of its own…

So anyway, it’s early yet, three chapters in and hopefully two more later today, and only forty-five after that…But I’ve got this. These days I’m tackling shorter chapters. The last time I was really in novel-length mode I’d gotten into the rhythm of much longer chapters, and that worked then and this works now, they make sense in context, and it would be nice to write long chapters again but for now shorter is better…

Anyway, this is to say I feel happy about this, and since this one is a long one and it’s a completely original idea and I already know the whole thing but little things will keep popping up as necessary, and I want this done in forty days or so…I am locked into a zone. This isn’t always how these things play out or even need to or should, but when it happens and it looks very clear and true and doable…

So I’ve begun writing. And I will, once again, continue.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Not-the-Tonys 2024

Gosh, I’m not very good at keeping these up, but let’s go ahead and have a brief look at what my favorite things from 2023 were…

Movies

This one’s pretty easy. Like a lot of critics (for a change!), my pick is Oppenheimer. I’ve been a huge fan of Christopher Nolan since Memento, and so have followed his career eagerly ever since. This is clearly a career high (and as a big fan this is an amazing statement).

Before seeing Oppenheimer last summer my answer would’ve been Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, which I still highly recommend. Other highlights from the year include Napoleon, Asteroid City, The Creator. It was a good year for movies.

Books

My favorite new book of the year was J.K. Rowling’s seventh Robert Galbraith Strike/Ellacott mystery The Running Grave. Favorite read in general was Milton’s Paradise Lost, favorite graphic novel Lemire, Kindt & Rubin’s Cosmic Detective, and taking a stab at a monthly comic probably Tom King’s Human Target, which finished last spring.

Music 

Gosh, I’m gonna give this one to The National, who I finally got into last year after discovering them at the end of Warrior back in 2011. The Beatles released “Now and Then” at the end of the year, Darius Rucker dropped a new album.

TV

I haven’t been exploring a lot of new things since the streaming era took over, so it was a lot of just continuing favorites like various Star Treks, YellowstoneGhosts, Survivor, even a revival of Frasier. Did get to see The Mandalorian and Sandman at the very end of the year thanks to physical releases.

Writing Projects

I tackled exactly two projects last year, In the Leviathan and Liz & Pepe. Both were well worth the efforts. Did a lot of prep work for other things, and I’m really, really close to starting up again. 

Favorite Family Time

The two visits with my niece and the rest of her clan! Obviously! The highlights of the year!

Monday, January 1, 2024

Closing in on The Children’s Crusade

You may be aware that the subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is “The Children’s Crusade,” and you may also know that during the Crusades there was an actual children’s crusade, which is the point at which people tend to agree they officially went off the rails.

My version is a little different. I first conceived of and sketched it out last year after finishing In the Leviathan, flush in the accomplishment and wanting something similarly meaningful (but for different reasons) to tackle next. Then I sat on it for the rest of the year.

Today I revisited the outline and revised it with a few key tweaks (including a timeline), so that the multiple character arcs play out in context to each other. This will be a tapestry of a story, tackling themes of responsibility, faith, and existential crisis, a commentary on the modern age that looks backward and still looks hopefully into the future.

I figure I will probably begin writing the thing soon. 

Sunday, November 26, 2023

A monster of a tale…

This morning I finished writing a short story I’ve been plucking away at since 2015 but haven’t touched since 2017. I think at one point I submitted a clearly unfinished version to a friend for one of his anthologies, which he rightly pointed out. It’s something I realized I had to do to get back in the writing groove, last month, so it was good to get it done. It’s another story that is from various vantage points, which is something I’ve realized works very well for my style of fiction. I especially like the idea that different people know different things, and so assembling such stories is like putting together a puzzle. Sometimes this can work in macro, and sometimes micro, which is what this one was. It also allows me to juggle the scope of the story, where I can pull out dramatically as a kind of commentary, or dial in closely. 

Naturally I began thinking I could definitely put together another short collection with it and various other works, although first it’ll finish out its run at my writing blog. I’ve still got a lot of interesting things just sitting there waiting for a permanent home. 

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Dzanc you very much...

This week I found out Dzanc Books was not going to be honoring In the Leviathan in its longlist, shortlist, or distinction of actually winning its 2023 novel contest.  And that's okay.  I'm going to keep looking for publishers.  I may revisit the utter lack of self-publishing I've done this year (except for Liz & Pepe, the 2023 Christmas collection for family I just pushed through a moment ago), or who knows?  I have some poetry collections I will probably definitely continue releasing, now that I think of it (and this reminds me that what I should be doing in the minutes ahead is write more of that)...

I of course also want to get back into the actual business of writing, which of course occurred recently with Liz & Pepe (a short work, but the lead was, like its predecessors, generously of novella length), which I kept procrastinating as more of the relevant details surfaced in the thought process.  While I found it easy in recent years to meander through writing projects, or barrel through some or parts of them, I've been in a different mode for much of this year.  I was happy, most of all, to have written Leviathan, which was satisfying on a number of levels, and while I quickly came up with new projects, knew there were older ones, and how I could improve those older ones, I didn't feel the urge to jump on them as I thought I might.  

Sometimes being rejected by a publisher or a contest will plunge me into some form of obvious depression, but that didn't happen this time, which was also an encouraging sign.  It would have been awesome to have a different result, but it was also nice how quickly Dzanc made its deliberations and announcements, and actually quicker than I was expecting.  I would've loved to have been able to write in the pages of Liz that I have a publishing contract for the first time ever, but it was also nice to not be able to, if that makes sense.  


The journey continues.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

I’m just gonna reiterate this…

Writing is not always writing.

Sometimes it doesn’t look like writing at all. When I’m deep into a project and actively writing and it’s going well, I absolutely believe writing every day is a reasonable axiom. But it’s not always like that, especially if you haven’t started writing yet, or even sometimes in the middle of a project.

Because sometimes you’re not going to be writing because your subconscious knows you have more thinking to do. Because writing is mostly thinking. 

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