Those rejections…

I just got a couple rejection notices. I had submitted Seven Thunders again earlier this year, and finally got word back. I submitted a chapter of Collider, got word back. But I guess I used to have a harder problem with that. I just took them in stride. Trying to be stoic about it, maybe. Or maybe it’s because I’ve grown a little dull to the idea after all the self-publishing. I don’t get any actual sales from that. I’m not exactly slick about it. There were a lot of bloggers who figured this out, just among the communities I joined a decade or so back. Some of them absolutely, shamelessly manipulated the system. I never cared for that. I never cared for the reciprocity game. I don’t find integrity in reviews, either, that are disingenuous (“I never read this genre but somehow still loved this book by this buddy o’ mine”). And I certainly have the sales to show for it. I’m actually not sure I’ve ever made a sale to a blogging acquaintance. I actively stopped converting to ebooks when it became clear good ol’ Pat would swoop in on promotion days to get them for free. I certainly bought my fair share of free books that way, I know, and it almost always led to disappointment. 

But I’m thinking, set up one more blog, a dedicated Danab Cycle blog, and centralize promotion, chatter. If I opt for that. I always had big dreams for this. But now I have two completed manuscripts, and I guess my patience for the publishing world grows thin. I just don’t know how to do it. 

It’s a thought, anyway. I try not to be cynical. I know my efforts aren’t ever really that prolonged. I know I’m prone to giving up. Part of this is because I’m also a big fan of comic books. In that medium all of this works. I did find out it doesn’t exactly work to get into comics, either. So there’s that. But comic book creators are always hopping, throughout their careers, all over the place, and no one bats an eye. I mean, Marvel just inked a deal to publish John Byrne’s indy X-Men. 

I know I have the itch to write. It’s the getting published that was always the problem, or finding myself in scenarios that successfully led in that direction. Then self-publishing became just so darn easy…

Anyway, we’ll see.

Collider…completed.

 

It seems positively unimaginable…

Back when all this began, it wasn’t going to be a book at all, it was just screwing around, and then I planned a different story, which was supposed to be a book, and I wrote that, and it became apparent to me that I really did want to write that first story, write that first book.

But it required a lot of work, because again, it wasn’t conceived as a book, and I was just a dumb kid at the time, and…But there were the bones of something, there. And I just kept thinking about it.

A little less than a decade ago, I wrote something that was very, very close to writing Collider itself. It gave me the first real bones of what it would become. So I kept plugging away at the ideas, and slowly they started to make sense to me, to coalesce. And in the past two years I wrote two full-length manuscripts, and then it seemed like I was finally ready.

Then I started writing it. At first it was slow going, just picking away at it. A few weeks ago I slipped into another gear. I started writing daily, longer chapters than I’ve written in a long time, day after day, and I started feeling the momentum. The story started surprising me. It took turns I didn’t expect. 

And now, it’s done. It’s finally done. This last chapter was almost anticlimactic. How strange is that? I could barely sleep last night, the anticipation of this moment clogging the atmosphere…

Now, of course, the real work begins…

Finally (really!) writing Collider

I started writing Collider yesterday. 

It’s only about thirty years in the making. When I first came up with the Space Corps stories, the Danab didn’t even exist. It’s since become known as the Danab Cycle. I didn’t really have a story, back then, but I stumbled into one when I very unexpectedly decided to kill off one of the main characters early on.  Hey, I’m a Star Trek geek. I’m sure there was some Tasha Yar reasoning involved. 

As the years advanced, I worked on the story until everything about it made sense. I even figured out why that character’s death meant something. I wrote a novella, eventually, dealing specifically with that (Terrestrial Affairs), which kind of lightened the load a little. It remains absolutely essential to this story, but the whole story doesn’t have to explain why it happened so much as what resulted. 

I had the last of the needful breakthroughs, really, only later in the day. So I added to what I wrote yesterday this morning. And can now plunge confidently forward.

I‘ll keep you posted…

New Danab Cycle Short, farewell to Kindle Vella...

I just completed a new Danab Cycle short over at Sigild V, Soldiers of Ancient Seas, which serves as a prequel to the, um, Earth prequel to the, err, Earth prequel to everything that's going to...

Listen, I know this kind of sounds complicated.  I dreamed up all of this many years ago, and've been further developing and expanding the stories I wanted to tell along the way.  Originally it was what has since been entitled Collider, which is the real winner in finishing Soldiers, since it's fully my intention to make finally writing Collider the major project of the year, only oh some three decades in the making.  But the first book I actually wrote was Seven Thunders, which for years I thought, if there was only going to be one book actually written, that was going to be it, but in the years since, just trying to find a publisher, I really have expanded my ambitions.  I plotted out many books before I really got to thinking about the kinds of stories that needed to be told, and so I plotted a couple of prequels, one that revolves around the war that begins all this, and the other about the events that set all this in motion in the first place...

Soldiers is actually a bridge between them.  It's also the first time I've posted a serialized story (comic book scripting excepted)  at the writing blog in years, having in recent years devoted such efforts to Kindle Vella or entirely offline (what a thought!).  Kindle Vella (and I guess I ought to include Wattpad, where I first used an alternative platform, and I walked away from long ago at this point) closed up shop and is officially winding down and taking down content in a handful of days, I'll forever be grateful for, as it somehow provoked me to write stories that I would never have written, lastly A Most Excellent Fancy last year.

Fancy, in my personal files, now incorporates the footnotes the platform encouraged users to include, in the traditional footnote format (which, honestly, if nothing else I'm certainly happy to have been able to do), which I hope I can figure out how to include in a file Kindle itself will allow me to publish in paperback later.  I still have a backlog of material waiting, including the short story collection I'm including Soldiers.  If I can pull off the footnotes I'll be very happy indeed.  

Anyway, ever onward...

Abigail Only!

Last week I finalized and Amazon published Abigail Only, the 2024 family Christmas collection.

Every year this millennium (or more or less) I've written and distributed at least a poem each Christmas for family, and since 2020 I've led the chapbooks I've been distributing with novellas.  This year's was a departure from the ones I'd been writing, the first one set in the real world rather than the fantasy land of Wendale.  This year I had the story already set, but the title was inspired by something my sister said in relation to my newest and possibly last of all niece, a phrase that just seemed irresistible.

Among the other material I included is a short story relating to the Danab Cycle, a follow-up to a story I wrote years ago that I'd been wanting to revisit, and anyway helps further flesh out Danab society, which since I decided finally to call the Space Corps stories the Danab Cycle because of their huge importance in the saga, was always necessary as I've gotten around to writing more of it, and am headed steadily toward writing Collider, thirty years in the making...Before I get there, though, I have another short project I want to tackle, examining a kind of origin (in this world there are a lot of origin stories that need telling, and I've got two of the last books I intend to write dedicated to the two biggest secret origins of the whole saga), what exactly might be known about all this in the present day, Earth, when nothing at all here seems to be happening in relation to it.

A Journal of the Pandemic #36: A Conclusion

Back in 2020, the pandemic for me began with the cancellation of a family reunion. I’m happy to report we finally got around to making up for that.

COVID is still circulating. At my workplace it was running kind of rampant (as much as it can these days) in recent weeks, so obviously it’s not going away anytime soon. 

The good news is that life is pretty much back to normal, where it was before all that began. 

My brother, the oldest one, who was the first to bow out of the 2020 reunion when it was still voluntary to decide about lockdown measures, is retiring from the Air Force. This ended up being the occasion, at the ceremony yesterday, to getting the gang back together for the first time in nine years (at Mom’s funeral).

It was pretty awesome. I’m not going to describe everything here, but it also meant I got to catch up with my Maine nephews for the first time since 2017, in which they’ve both been literally and figuratively growing leaps and bounds.

Of course I got to see the Burito (as I did last year) (twice) (and again in June!), and her expanding network of sisters and brother, and that was great!

I learned a little of the new Billy Joel song and almost pulled it off at the ceremony (my brother’s a big fan, but I seem to be a little more involved in some of Billy Joel’s career in recent years than he’s been, but then he’s been very, very busy in his career(s)).

Played some card games! Card games are one of the religions we ascribe to.

And other games. Even a little of the Olympic Games! 

And some good tours of a little local nature (including the obligatory trip to Bailey Island) (and several helpings of Moxie).

May have made the most significant breakthroughs in thirty years of prep work on Collider! So that was pretty cool.

And yes, officially closing the thoughts on the pandemic here, about a year after I last discussed it.

Did not throw baby out with the bathwater, thank you...

I had my observation for the CDA process a few weeks back, and as such turned in Don't Throw Baby Out with the Bathwater, the professional portfolio I had to put together and previously considered compiling as an actual book (with inserts).  It probably wouldn't have mattered a whole lot how I did it, since the observer (it was a good experience, all considering, don't get me wrong) didn't spend too much time looking at it.  I ended up putting the portfolio in the same fashion as I did the collection I submitted as my thesis for college, a three-holepunch-folder.  Anyway, it was certainly interesting to work on the thing, and I have the CDA test coming up in two weeks, and that will conclude the process, and I will be a slightly more official caregiver as a result.

I have a bunch of projects I am definitely going to probably tackle in the near future.  Before we dig into that let's just acknowledge the pause I've entered in self-publishing.  This is because I submitted In the Leviathan for publication and it feels weird having that floating around at the moment and continuing the slightly less legitimate business that has sold single digits of copies of all the books I've put out in the past decade.  This means a pause for the poetry collections I don't tend to advertise here, and republication of Cloak of Shrouded Men as The Man Comes Around, and A Guide to 52, a project I tackled and abandoned previously but dug back into earlier this summer.  

Not included in that embargo would be the Christmas collections I've been doing for family.  This year's is entitled Liz & Pepe, and I've got all the elements sketched out and will probably begin writing it either in the next few days or when I'm on vacation in another week's time.  Actually, I've more or less been on vacation for most of the past week with Idalia having made its way through town.  I once again got lucky with the hurricane business, although the uncertainty of the experience this time as compared to Ian last year apparently settled my nerves only a little without having to be evacuated this time.  So I sat around waiting to see how things would turn out without really spending the time overly wisely.  Got some reading done.  That's the extent of my achievements, there.

Anyway, as I pretend I'm going to be writing Collider any minute, it occurred to me that I really ought to have the next book in the Danab Cycle in fighting shape, only to discover it absolutely wasn't, and so some of my recent writing escapades was spent revising the outline for The Fateful Lightning.  Surprisingly, I not only figured out how to do so, but a better way to do so not very long later.

All that and The Children's Crusade, which part of me really wants to tackle sooner rather than later, and maybe I really will.  Maybe I'll tackle Liz & Pepe, Collider, and Crusade all before the end of the year.  I've certainly worked on multiple projects simultaneously before!

Sometimes I've dumped a lot of projects into blog posts like this and I Grant Morrisoned them later, but it is absolutely not the intention for any of these.  Writing the Bathwater portfolio was a small but notable task in itself, after Leviathan in the early months of the year, and usually I haven't just launched directly into continuous projects (although I have on occasion, with shorter works, which is what was consuming me the last few years).  I've been pushing upward with wordcounts, getting back into full-length shape, and while there was certainly a period where I tackled that on a yearly basis, the last one remains the messiest thing I've ever written, and even the lost manuscript from the midsection I wouldn't really be happy with today.  So it's good to be at a pause.  I'm okay with it.  Wanting to plunge back in.  But this is not a writer who believes writing regularly means what some think.  Just knowing I have these major projects imminently in the pipeline is exhilarating.

Then there's the business of actually being read...

So I cooked up TWO new novel(ish)-length projects…

After finishing up In the Leviathan, I certainly didn’t expect I would quickly come up with new projects that weren’t Collider. But I did anyway.

The Children’s Crusade is something I sketched out pretty rapidly once I came up with the idea, tracking a cast of twelve characters across ten sections (two are linked pairs). Using much the track I’ve been riding since first tackling Kindle Vella, I’m pretty confident I can do this. Despite the title, this is not related to the Middle Ages (umm…not technically!), nor Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, but rather that old American chestnut the Fountain of Youth.

And then even more recently I conjured A Centaur Died., another vision of the modern world. These are both very much literary fiction, which I figured was probably a good thing to have in case anyone is interested in publishing Leviathan.

I envision about ten weeks writing Crusade, but I haven’t yet worked out the details in that regard with Centaur. It’ll keep me busy writing in 2023, anyway. Crusade will hit at least 50,000 words (we’ll see how many!), and draws from work experiences both past (as in a decade ago) and present, among other things. By this point I’m pretty clear on how I best approach my fiction, especially long-form. So I would be foolish to back off while the going (at least the writing!) is good. That’s why this is happening.

Not-the-Tonys 2022

Ha! So obviously this isn't quite yet an annual tradition (the first and only previous edition was in 2020), but I figured it was worth revisiting, since everyone loves an end of the year wrap-up.

Favorite Writing Project:

Obviously this would be Event Fatigue, which I've chronicled here as extensively as anything else on the blog in the past decade (and hey! 2022 was also the decade anniversary of the blog!), tackled over at Kindle Vella throughout the year and eventually my final self-published book of the year (there were many!).  Basically it was my only project in the past year, but it was quite an interesting one, and as I've stated, the longest work I've written in about the same timespan as this blog's existence.

Favorite Family Memory:

This one actually has a few options.  My niece, the Burrito, although our conversations via FaceTime have dwindled in the past year (she's just so busy!!!), we had some good ones, including at the start of the year (the inspiration for key elements in Uncle Toby), and on her birthday (in which she confessed a vulnerability).  But I made a trip to Alabama to attend my oldest nephew's high school graduation, and that was not only my first trip since the start of the pandemic, but also a rare trip to that particular leg of the family.  Lots of good food was had, and a lot more interesting things happened than I am going to get into here (but not in any of the ways you're probably currently imagining!), so with apologies to the Burrito, it has to take the spot here.

Favorite Work Memory:

I finally got to switch room assignments (not really going to get into that, either), which led to a whole odyssey of my second real miracle at this job, the second time I have definitely helped a child in my care.  Nothing can possibly top that!  Also notable was the time off due to Hurricane Ian, and then the day off due to Hurricane Nicole!  Sometimes work memories don't necessarily involve work.  Everything worked out both times, at least in my neck of the woods, thankfully.

Favorite Book (New):

The Ink Black Heart, the latest Robert Galbraith mystery featuring Strike & Ellacott.  I know the author has become controversial, but any rational person wouldn't possibly let that get in the way of a great book.

Favorite Book (Old):

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, which I finally got around to reading, and thank goodness, because I obviously loved it.  Kya is the American Lisbeth Salander.  The movie adaptation is great, one of the best movies of the year, too.

Favorite Book (Comic):

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King & Bilquis Evely, a combination of King explaining as no creator before him has what makes Supergirl great (and distinct from her cousin), and an original story that he weaves around her, the first time he's told an almost wholly original story since his debut novel, The Once Crowded Sky.

Favorite TV Show (New):

For a Star Trek fan, it's kind of impossible to go with any other answer than Strange New Worlds, which reimagines Pike's Enterprise, and in the brilliant season finale revisit the classic "Balance of Terror" (while simultaneously introducing the third-ever actor to play Kirk).

Favorite TV Show (Old): 

I'm enjoying Ghosts (the American version) more than ever as it plunges into its second season.  It's such a little miracle of a show, an ensemble with a rich cast it rotates through but is at its best when playing everyone off each other (as all the best shows do).  I've been trying to watch the original British version, too, and recently realized one of my favorite episodes was from it (there's only so much actual overlap between them).

Favorite Music:

I finally, finally got a copy of Brian Wilson's Smile, an album he originally set out to make with the Beach Boys, but a project that eventually led to his departure from the group and hibernation as a creator for some thirty years, until he completed and released it in 2004.  It's so good!  It's such a complete pop composition, the sessions "Good Vibrations" came from, so in the same creative vein, an extension of his vision for Pet Sounds (all of this pushing the Beatles to their own creative heights at the time).

Writing Projects 2023:

The big one, and what I intend to begin literally after wrapping this up, is tackling In the Leviathan, which I've been talking about here for a number of years at this point.  This will be purely literary fiction, an interpretation of my grandfather's life.  And should I succeed and in good time, I'll then finally tackle Collider, the second full-length Danab Cycle adventure.

Done writing Event Fatigue!

I finally finished Event Fatigue over at Kindle Vella!

I've been slogging away at this sucker since January, originally a slow and sporadic pace, much as I'd done with the two previous stories I wrote for the platform, but started to realize, a few months ago, at that pace it was probably going to take forever, so I just settled into some daily writing for the first time in a while, and am pleased to have reached the end.

It's not very long, but it's the longest story I've written in about a decade, although ironically it's only about as long as what I had successfully done on a number of occasions previously by completing NaNoWriMo, fifty thousand words written in the month of November.  

As with most of what I write, it didn't turn out as I imagined when I started in, but definitely as someone might expect who's ever read me before, although in a lot of respects, it's the most complete version of what I've done several times in the past, which is to track the perspectives of a large cast of characters, in this instance a group of mutant superheroes who experience a shocking death, and the story explains their reactions, how things got to that point, and how things turn out.  

The term "event fatigue" will be familiar to comic book fans, who in recent decades have generally gotten tired of "event books," massive crossovers that always promise "everything will be different!" until, well, the next massive crossover.  I use it to mean a number of things, including as a commentary on modern times, though never to exactly bludgeon the reader (there's plenty of that on social media, thank you very much).

A funny thing happened along the way, formatting-wise.  I started out writing directly on the platform, but when I got into daily writing, I wrote into the Word document I was compiling chapters into, and pasting that into the platform messed up formatting on the platform itself, and I am not savvy enough to correct such things.  As far as I can tell, no one is reading it there anyway, and the long-term goal is to get another paperback out of it (which, again, will be the longest I've released in a long time, and the longest in the format size I've been using for half a decade), which I plan to expend a little more marketing energy on than I usually do.

I've got other things to tackle.  I've got the next Christmas collection (Uncle Toby), a story I meant to be writing all year (Death Is Wearing Me Out), and of course, as always, recently, Collider.

But it feels really, really good to have finished this!

Updates on Current Doings (or, 2022 Begins to Take Shape)

I sketched up the major projects I'll be tackling this year, Event Fatigue (the third Kindle Vella; previously reported as Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue) and Death Is Wearing Me Out (the once-monthly project succeeding World Famous; a ghost story, since it's apparently the thing that attracts me at the moment).  Both should be very, very interesting, and more accessible than their predecessors (World Famous, being about wrestling, and Nine Panel Grid, which is probably quite impenetrable).

But let's talk about those a little more, shall we?  Technically I should've finished World Famous by the end of last year.  Didn't really turn out that way.  I have two chapters yet to write, but they'll be easy enough to finish, and would've been done this morning if the very computer I'm using at the moment had cooperated (clever companies think they improve everything when they sometimes make them needlessly complicated).  In hindsight I'm all the happier I chose to do this a year ago, and that I plugged away at it dutifully (sometimes with a little catching up).  

Even Nine Panel Grid, since it handles a story I intended to write nearly two decades earlier (alas, a comics contest I probably hilariously fell far short of even coming close to winning).  I'm now six chapters away from finishing, about a month and a half, since it's mostly a once-a-week project, having started at the beginning of October.

Event Fatigue will be forty-four chapters, the longest by far (double the length of Nine Panel) I've tackled for Kindle Vella.  I still need to flesh out the story, but it's going to be pretty straight-forward, and also involve superheroes.  I picked out a cover image that hopefully at least stands out a little better than my last two.  It also picks up characters originally derived from an older project, which only occurred to me when I finally sat down to begin an outline.  This one should be fun.

I'm still writing up material for Substack, in the meantime.  I have no idea if I have a chance at developing an actual following there, but it's worth an effort.  I plan to devote one installment to Nine Panel Grid, perhaps write an actual story (you'd understand if you had a look at Nine Panel exactly what I'm talking about) and the journey to working on it.  I did write a story in the Space Corps saga, and probably will do more in the future.

I know I was just talking about Space Colony Bactria, and obviously Collider, and I really need to get on Montague, but as a writer doing it on the side, I have to decide the projects that can work around the schedule.  

As always, we'll see.

Nine Panel Grid, Gracie, World Famous...

 This week I'm on vacation, and I'm doing something somewhat insane.  I'm working on three different projects simultaneously.

One of them is Nine Panel Grid, my second Kindle Vella project.  (You can follow the progress here.  I've already posted the three chapters you can read for free, and submitted the next one a moment ago.)  This one's a strange beast that I'm tackling one chapter at a time to see how it might evolve.  It's a rare story where I heavily suspect I would have to do revisions once this draft is completed, if I hope for it to be anything more than it currently is.  At any rate it's very interesting to write.

I'm also tackling Gracie, the follow-up to George & Gracie, the title story and lead to my annual Christmas collection that'll be sent out to family.  Here we are in October.  The plan is to write a chapter every day through Sunday, and since I planned for seven chapters, if I manage to keep that up I'll have that part done by then.  (My dad actually asked about this year's Christmas poem yesterday!  He's never interested in my writing.  And this is the first time anyone's anticipated one of these at all, so that was doubly pleasant to hear.  I'll tackle the poem later, which is never very hard to write.)

I'm also having to play catch-up with World Famous, a project I've been working on all year, not a long story, but possibly the longest story I'll have written since I was writing novel manuscripts routinely a decade back.  Two more days and I'll be caught up, so don't worry.  It continually surprises me how easy this one's been to write (but then I'm once again returning to the well of each chapter being from a new perspective, which I've done a number of times at this point in my fiction), and today's was no exception.  It helped I got to put in some dialogue for a change.  I love crazy conversations.  But then, that's the kind you're likely to have with me in the real world, too.  I just have more to say when I'm writing, is all.

So I did all three today.  All I need to do is repeat that twice more.  I'm not sure how many chapters of Nine Panel Grid I want to do this week.  If I do three or four more (counting Thursday and Saturday, which is usually when I work on Kindle Vella chapters; Friday I'll be headed out to watch some movies, so I expect only to work on Gracie), fine.  This one's twenty-two chapters, so I'm not in a rush to finish it like I was Aronnax last vacation, not by any stretch.  I have no specific time-table for it.  Working on it at all this week is a bonus, especially given the other stories.

As of today it's a great way to spend a vacation.  When I was writing novel manuscripts I was either underemployed or not employed at all, or had time to kill under unusual circumstances.  Since I've been working full time at my current job, it's been tough to motivate myself to spend a lot of time writing (even though I desperately want to finally write Collider) (which I hope will happen next year), although I've certainly worked on a number of projects, put out a few story collections this year alone.  

Everyone at work asked me where I was going.  Well, to the library, to a land called Wendale, to right here in Tampa...

Dead Butlers, In the Leviathan, Collider

A relative few minutes ago I finished up another comic script project, Dead Butlers, over at Sigild, an interlocking twenty-two page Batman pastiche that expanded past its original parameters (by ten script pages!). It was just one of those things that struck as an interesting idea and just sort of continued to blossom, and anyway was great fun to write along the way.

Yesterday I had a thunderbolt concerning In the Leviathan, a work in progress that suddenly came into vivid shape. Part of that is because I sent Nazi Crimes to one of my favorite cousins, and she almost immediately texted back incredibly enthusiastic initial thoughts, and we talked a little about the Montague story, and where I saw it heading, so somewhere in the back of my mind it must have been rattling waiting for that moment.

Concerning Collider, the project I really thought I was writing, finally, I had paused on after actually getting started on it, but it wasn’t feeling right and eventually I realized it was because I wasn’t telling it right. And so I hit the pause button and almost immediately knew what needed changing, and so that was pretty great.

I sent some poems to a literary journal tangentially related to my alma mater last weekend, so that was pretty interesting. No idea if they have a shot at acceptance, but it’s the first time in a long time I’ve submitted poetry anywhere. 

Danab Cycle editing

Last week I finished up editing Danab Cycle, a short story collection of Space Corps material. This is a result of the IWSG exit at the start of the year. I’ve amassed a good number of stories over the years from the saga, and this collection represents the material that hasn’t yet been published elsewhere. I’ll link and feature the cover later (as well as a formal announcement for last year’s Nazi Crimes, another collection), but I figured it was worth mentioning here ahead of time.

Editing the collection was interesting, as always, finding ways to improve as necessary, and really just revisiting, in some cases, work I hadn’t had a look at in years. Tonally there’s a good range. There’s one new story unseen anywhere else, based on what I used to consider a potential comic book (and even commissioned artwork for), which I expanded further in the editing process.

I’m all the more proud, as I have been anytime I’ve worked on a writing project recently, for making the time to do it. I don’t know, it seems in recent years my attitude has changed about what it looks like to spend time writing. I used to be fine taking long breaks between projects, but that was when I was tackling long projects routinely. When that period ended, I didn’t realize how far I drifted from it until I realized I wasn’t even tackling long projects anymore.

This ended up on my mind, naturally, since my next project is of course a long project, the second Danab Cycle/Space Corps book-length manuscript, Collider, the outline for which I am finally 100% satisfied has reached workable condition. So I will certainly keep you posted on how that develops. And hopefully I start writing it soon, too...

Danab Cycle

Recently I have been having one breakthrough after another with Collider, which is part of what here I’ve been calling the Space Corps books, but perhaps will be known as the Danab Cycle, so I’m transitioning that label with this post.

This is a story, Collider specifically and Danab Cycle in general, that I have been working on for a quarter century. I was a kid spitballing a version of Star Trek when it began, but over the years the idea has grown in sophistication and nowhere was it more necessary than in fleshing out what exactly Collider itself is supposed to be. There was no coherent story originally, but funny enough there was a broad arc that needed to be supported, and as I saw that more and more clearly, I better understood what the book itself should look like.

Writing is a bit like excavation, or even the old anecdote of Michelangelo freeing an existing statue from stone. It’s not always clear what the story is. Sometimes it comes to you in little thunderstrikes. You realize this is exactly what it is. Hopefully on the other end, to the reader, this is how it feels, that this was the best way to do it. (As a reader, too, this is how I approach it, and certainly, there will always be interpretations and opinions, although some are better than others, just as in the storytelling itself.)

So these are the kinds of ideas I’ve had recently; “Why didn’t I see that before???” Characters, sometimes minor ones, sometimes the most important ones, finally hitting their marks. 

And I think it’s getting closer to being ready to be written. 

A Fruitful Day for Ideas

 Today turned out to be a good day to get back on the horse, or at least the beginning of getting back on it.

Since the death of my previous computer, I’ve kind of slowly gotten back to work. Looking back over everything I’ve already done this year, I see that I was busier than I sometimes allow myself to think, a lot of projects (some since lost, including the big revision project for a contest I’m reasonably sure I won’t be winning because Submittable wasn’t letting me attach the file but still somehow let me “submit,” and at the time I convinced myself it had somehow worked out despite the issues the site was having...) that were all in themselves well worth tackling, and all of which in some ways built on each other.

Anyway, one of the things that was eaten was a new vision of Collider, a long-term project a quarter century in the making that’s the first Space Corps story I ever began working on. Today I did a fresh take of the outline as I recently radically reconsidered it, building on elements I developed during Terrestrial Affairs, the novella from a few years back. It’s strange how much can change but still the basic shape remains as first begun in the mid-90s. Realizing this was possible was part of the reason I didn’t completely freak out over my computer dying and erasing the last version.

I also tackled an outline for George & Gracie, the novella I’ll be including in my Christmas poems collection this year (which is another project being revisited, with the novella being a substitute for two shorter works I lost and don’t want to rewrite). These collections are for my niece, the Burrito, although this year I plan to send the results around to family, in the hopes they might actually begin to see me as a legitimate writer (and not as “gee wiz that dude who keeps trying to make that happen,” which is the recent impression I kind of got from my dad). Anyway, it’s something I’m really excited to tackle, and will be the first thing I work on actually writing.

I also came up two other ideas today, “Kingslayer” and “Old Brown’s Daughter,” though I won’t really talk about what exactly they are here, although they reminded me about an idea I had earlier in the year, “Old Wizards,” and how much that would be fun to get back to. (“Old” being in a title twice is probably a coincidence.) These are ideas that practically told themselves when I conceived them. You don’t take such ideas lightly.

Plus today was the second day of my latest comic book scripting project, Catman/Batwoman, which nominally is a riff on Tom King’s real comic, Batman/Catwoman. It’s going to be the shortest to date, twelve script pages. But nine panel grids every page! (For those who don’t know, “Catman” is an actual DC character. The “Batwoman” indicated is actually Barbara Gordon, the original and most famous Batgirl, who has never actually been referred to as Batwoman. Except in this project. Because: symmetry.)

Updates February 2020

Been working on A Squire's History of Oz recently, a nonfiction project I've been meaning to realize for a little while now.  I also have some more submissions I'll be tackling, one of them that's due in about a week and the story for which I figured out this morning.  Tentatively calling it "Rest Stop."  The other is centered around Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, otherwise known as the Captain Nemo story.  I actually read it a few years back for the first time, and was amazed at how compelling the first part of it, before Nemo is even introduced, actually was.  There's a Jules Verne park here in Tampa, so I almost feel compelled to work on this one.

Apart from these, I have Three Stooges Syndrome, in that there are of course larger projects I want to begin tackling, that I've mentioned here before, one of which (Collider) I worked on the outline for after previously tackling it anew last October, just before the blood-in-the-eye thing happened, which sort of derailed me for a while, and they keep butting up against each other.  And then I follow links in emails for shorter pieces I can submit, and...Oh, and I also worked on formatting another of the poetry collections, so that's another thing, and finally ordered copies of the last one I put out.

Plus, wrote about what I'm working on here, at the blog, which I don't do often enough.  Or perhaps the commentary I was doing a year ago for another project still leaves me feeling guilty...

Collider, Jupiter's Beard, the avalanche of poetry

The last time I checked in I quickly glossed on the avalanche of poetry I'm working on.  Well, I made some progress, further compiling and then just yesterday finding some additional collections, pushing the total number of volumes...quite high.  I don't often think of myself as a poet, but I've...written a lot of poems over the years, and every time quite passionately.  So it's weird that I don't think of myself as a poet.  I guess it's harder to be a poet without recognition than it is a novelist.

Speaking of that, Jupiter's Beard, in the title, is the retitled Kiss Me Quick, and it's something I'm still very much working toward. 

Collider, meanwhile, is another project I'm working on.  In fact, it's the oldest project I've worked on...ever, really, and the one I've never even come close to actually writing.  It's part of the Space Corps sequence, and as indicated, the first one I ever worked on, beginning plotting way back in 1995 (and probably earlier).  I've continuously revised outlines, streamlining and making it more sophisticated.  I've reached the point where I finally need to write the thing.

Part of the motivation is that it will be a more straightforward story than Seven Thunders.  You may or may not recall that Seven Thunders was the passion project for Space Corps, something I finally wrote about five years back and have been timidly submitting ever since ("timidly" here meaning sporadically), including on my birthday about a month ago.  Got a form rejection for it recently.  Decided that wasn't going to be the end of the story.  Seven Thunders is a heavily complex story.  Collider, as I've said, as I've worked away at it, is simpler, more naturally geared toward specific story beats that flow organically.  And this week, I began working on yet another plot revision, further streamlining it.  Some of that was made possible by Terrestrial Affairs, the novella that wasn't supposed to feature Collider material but did, which makes both stories better for it, hopefully.

And maybe I can get the damn thing accepted by a publisher.