Have submitted Children's Crusade to New Directions Novel Prize 2024...

So, just submitted Children's Crusade to New Directions' Novel Prize 2024 contest.  I last attempted to submit to the contest in its first iteration in 2020, but the process screwed up, the file didn't load, and I ended up losing the file when my computer died a few months later (a significant revision of the middle section from In the Land of Pangaea I've never had the heart to revisit, much less a needed retooling of the whole manuscript).

I'm mean, it'd be nice to be published by anyone, but New Directions would be particularly ideal.  It's the publisher behind most of Roberto Bolano's English translations, Helen DeWitt's home, and the house that put out Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, all among the greatest treasures of my reading experience.  

Heck, if the criteria had specifically forbidden it, I would've submitted In the Leviathan, too.  

Sure it's a pipedream, and has been for decades, now, but it's still nice to be able to dream.  I think Crusade came out nicely, but that's my extremely biased opinion.  I have so much more I'd love to write, including a whole series of historical fiction I was dreaming up earlier today, plus stuff like A Centaur Died., Book of Doom, and of course the Danab Cycle, which demands so much more space than I reasonably have working full-time.

Just have to wait until, oh, January...

The Computer Ate My Homework

 Well, it’s official. My computer ate my homework. Which is to say, my computer died and took my files with it.

Three weeks ago I got stuck in the rain, and I happened to have my tablet with me. It was a horrendous downpour. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t get it to a shop until the end of the week, or if it died more or less instantly, but the end result was, because it was such a compact instrument, it was a complicated business just to answer whether or not my files were retrievable even before the diagnosis, and certainly out of the question after.

So I lost material. I lost the whole Oz affair. I lost Squire’s History of Oz, the greater nonfiction work, and “Falling Toward Oz,” which for me was far more valuable. I talked about this stuff here. It was actually some of the last material I actively talked about here. If COVID-10 hadn’t hit, this would not have even been an issue. I don’t have Wi-Fi at home. I travel to get it. This was far easier pre-pandemic, and even beyond that, when everything closed, it was more or less around the time I was completing this work. I’d’ve self-published it months ago. 

But now it’s been eaten. If I wanted, I could reconstruct the book itself and even tackle the story again. I’m not feeling especially motivated to do that at the moment. I’m not grieving. I kind of figured this was going to be the result, and so I made peace with it the day I turned the tablet into the shop.

I lost the manuscript I carved out of In the Land of Pangaea, something I didn’t really talk about here, something I did earlier in the summer and submitted to a contest. All the work on that is lost unless by some miracle it has legs in the contest. Again, I could be okay with that. I loved working on that thing. It was if nothing else an excellent exercise in revision. 

I lost this year’s Christmas poem package for my niece! I wrote it ridiculously early as it was, so I can always rewrite that well before the end of the year. I know the bones of what I wrote. I can either attempt to replicate or do something new. It’s okay.

I lost some plotting for Space Corps! I didn’t lose the major Space Corps material. I have the Seven Thunders manuscript, and notes in an actual notebook for most of what I had been working on, and copies attached to emails for other things. There’s so much already quite unwritten about Space Corps anyway, it’s difficult to say what can be lost in such a manner as this. Having Seven Thunders as it is, and in the revised form as I’ve worked on it, is the main thing, and what would’ve been the big loss in a previous computer loss.

That’s not everything, but those are the highlights. I have email copies of stories I wrote this year. I will have to revert to backups for additional poetry collections, whenever I get around to that project again, losing whatever work I had done in that regard. (I think it eats what would’ve been the next release, in the state I left it, which again would not have been a problem pre-shutdown, because I would have published it well before this happened).

Last week I bought a school-sized (rather than pocket-sized) notebook, with the intention to perhaps work on stories and/or notes there. This would not be a guarantee against loss, either, but it would offer a different level of control. I have some really old notes! Stuff dating back to probably 1996 at least, a lot of old Space Corps material. That’s how I always did it before. Then at some point I started doing it on a computer, and when I had a printer handy would carefully print it out (another backup model!). Technically I have a printer now but have no idea if it actually works. I inherited from my sister. Has been sitting on a desk I don’t work at (I find desks hard to work at for extended periods, unless they’re big, and this one isn’t).

And at some point I will buy a new computer of some extraction. And be very, very careful, especially as it comes to file preservation!

A Journal of the Pandemic #15

Yeah, I'm starting to become annoyed.

 

Wrangled with Pat Dilloway on Twitter a few days ago about how he keeps insisting I haven't been taking the pandemic seriously.  I don't even blame Pat so much as how Twitter is being, well, Twitter. I know I already said I wanted to just back off Twitter again, because I have no history of heavy usage, and the pandemic period saw me use and learn more about how to use it than I'd ever done before.  As it turns out, just as everyone on Twitter lost their minds on every possible crusade.  One acquaintance I have there from back in my Colorado years noted how depressed he was getting from all the negativity, because he thoroughly identifies with everything Twitter is upset about, so I tried pointing out to him that what he needed was a break, because as it turns out regardless of how you view it, viewing that all day long every day is not going to be good for you.  I have no idea if he actually took it to heart, because soon after, despite taking a break from making his own posts about these things, he continued viewing and "liking" the tweets others were making, and...So, I'm just going to back off of Twitter. For real this time.

 

Obviously, what a lot of these people don't for a minute understand is that these crises are happening because there's a lot of pent-up frustration from the pandemic that needs a release valve, and there's nothing possible except getting angry about something, anything.  This is not to say these causes don't have merit, but that the ways they're being addressed right now are surely being affected by factors that have nothing at all to do with them, and maybe nothing at all to do with politics, either (to even address that would needlessly drag this discussion into politics, and I'm somewhat sick to death of politics right now...and there's still a massive election at the end of the year!).

 

I worked every day last week.  I know when I last wrote I was optimistic that there might be some sort of concession to the spiking numbers here in Florida and other places...but there wasn't.  Not in any appreciable way.  There are people who will blame politics for this, that woe is the leadership who won't do anything now and only did something then out of massive pressure...But that's the problem.  There was not a "one size fits all" approach to the early pandemic, and yet everyone was forced to react as if there was.  If reasonable measures had been put in place to begin with (work on getting masks for everyone, cutting off out-of-state, let alone out-of-country, travel except for truly essential purposes), we might have been able to see what the shape of this thing really was.  The United States is a big country.  We reacted as if everyone everywhere was faced at the same time with the same problem.  And that just wasn't the case.  But all discussion was muted because any discussion was deemed to suggest that the pandemic wasn't "real," that anything but the central narrative was counterproductive.  Which was and is complete hogwash nonsense.  We knew early on who the most vulnerable segments of the population were.  We knew who was most likely to die.  And yet the most shameful outcome of the pandemic to date, the nursing home deaths, remains all but ignored because it's not convenient and is not a big enough number for the number itself to shock and appall.  Well, I remain shocked and appalled.  These are invisible deaths, but they are still tragedies.

 

But the numbers spike and now, because we were bullied once, we seem more reluctant to respond as we did before.  Of course I'm annoyed.  I didn't want the response to be irrational in the first place, but that response was forced on all of us.  My job shut down for a month.  We reopened, cautiously, and slowly increased the numbers.  We were about two stages in last week, and by Wednesday, as per the announcement I heard and wrote about last time, technically all the kids I watched last week should have gone back home.  Their parents were not first stage essential workers.  That was a demonstrable fact.  Leadership decided otherwise.  Likely they decided they were simply going to freeze at the point they had reached, rather than continue incrementally increasing the numbers at the pace they had previously set.  I don't know.  Probably.  Hopefully?

 

Working with the one-year-old age group was interesting and challenging. This was the group I worked with the first year of my current job, before moving on to babies the second year, but I had never been in a room alone with them (given ratios and waiting for security clearance to finally happen, this wasn't surprising), so even though these were three-hour days it came with a learning curve.  This weekend I bought a few flashcard packs to help fill out the time, given how the kids responded well to that sort of thing last week.  Part of my spike response was just trying to escape the responsibility and challenge of it, but on that score I seem to be doing reasonably well. 

 

I continued working on the In the Land of Pangaea project, having renamed this second act The Pearls That Were His Eyes.  I hit a roadblock with the longest chapter, but broke that up (partly because of how last Monday played out in general) between two different working days, and soon enough had wrapped things up, happily figuring out a few more changes that needed to be made and how to handle them along the way.  Out of all the writing projects I've tackled during the pandemic, this was the most interesting. 

 

On that score, things are working out.

A Journal of the Pandemic #14

Well, the numbers started spiking in Florida...

So we are probably going to be sliding back to previous restrictions. They mandated masks inside public buildings Friday evening. Assuming it holds, at work they’re going to revert to the lowest level of numbers by midweek. Today was the first of what was supposed to be at least a week of helping out with the further expansion from previous levels. Guess that’s going to change...Again, if what I heard was accurate, and I understood it properly, none of these kids will be here by Wednesday. But I guess we’ll see.

Strange to be a part of the surge. Again, everyone expected Florida to be a hotspot early on, which never happened, until three months in. So I guess this COVID-19 business will just keep being interesting...

As I talked about last week, it’s now been a year since my niece, the Burrito, went to live in Texas. By midpoint last week I was having a hard time with it, and once again vowed to myself that I was just going to go cold turkey and put her behind me. But I got to talk to her a few times later in the week. I didn’t give up. Sometimes when you’re absolutely convinced about something, you can still end up changing your mind, even if it seems impossible. 

I mailed her a box for her birthday, which like my two-year anniversary at work and the year-mark with Texas, is a reminder that time is still passing. I’d been piling things up for months, for her, her coming baby brother, and my nephews in Maine, most of which, for them, had been waiting since last December, when I was supposed to see them, or maybe March, when again I was supposed to see them. Shipping those boxes was a good feeling. I don’t ship boxes very often. I do most of my Christmas shopping on Amazon (it’s convenient, okay???). I’ve sometimes felt, during this, that I haven’t done nearly enough for family, not that any of us are doing badly, but that staying connected, keeping spirits up, feels like what everyone ought to be doing. For a guy, even with family, who hates to initiate conversation, I hope I’ve at least done okay. Sending the box to my nephews felt especially necessary, because I really haven’t been able to do much with them since 2017, when I left Maine with my niece, and I cherish them greatly.

Anyway, so the transcription project with the second act of In the Land of Pangaea has been going well. When I reached the longest chapter I kind of hit the pause button, because transcribing is hard! Especially if you want to get a whole chapter done in one sitting! It doesn’t take much time, in the grand scheme, but it’s like writing longhand for a long time. It takes a toll. So when I finally tackled it this morning, I got about halfway, started feeling really good about it....and of course I was called in early at work! But I had gotten over the hump, and that’s what mattered. I’m almost done. I just have a little more to transcribe, a little new stuff to write, and then...!

I’m a troglodyte when it comes to entertainment platforms. I still buy DVDs. This weekend someone placed a box stuffed with old DVDs in the laundry shack.  The one movie I absolutely wanted (Burn After Reading), which I’ve sort of been obsessing over since talking about it with the Armchair Squid a few years back...the case was empty. But there were a few others that looked good. That was a pleasant surprise. I get that other people live in the modern age, but I don’t mind benefiting from their moving on. No movie in the box was particularly recent. For some reason there were two copies of Troy (I already have it, and the director’s cut). I just hope the box was there for good reasons, just making space. 

Oh, and got a Tom Brady Buccaneers t-shirt. Just a small reminder that good things have actually happened in the recent past...

A Journal of the Pandemic #13

It actually feels wrong to continue this journal, as the pandemic seems to be fading almost completely into the background, somehow, except in matters of slowly reopening things, and flare-ups. A quick thought on the recent flare-ups, though: One of the regions facing this is Florida, where I currently live. Back when all this started a lot of observers expected Florida to be hit heavily, which never really happened. Now that we’re ticking back up, I wonder if it has less to do with reopening measures and more the pandemic reaching here in numbers that just hadn’t happened previously, sort of the way the pandemic hit South America hard & heavy in recent weeks after having previously been virtually nonexistent. All of this suggests, to me anyway, that our response never really took a measured approach, that we went straight to panic, denounced anyone who contradicted this approach, and...But I guess this is the era we live in. I desperately wish there was a mainstream voice of reason, because all we seem to get is kneejerk rubbernecking that doesn’t stop for a moment to consider whether or not it’s remotely helpful. 

Anyway.

At work last week was easy. Two days of light duty at the center that’s closed, cleaning things up a little (there remains the possibility that if we return to full numbers and need to, we will...not actually keep the center closed until it can be renovated). My third and final work day was spending the day with a one-year-old I hadn’t previously had a lot of interaction with. But she was great! It was a good day. This week today was supposed to be my first day of work, but more busywork, but that was called off, and so I’m writing this. 

I’ve been immersed in the transcription process from the second act of In the Land of Pangaea. Honestly, this has been some of the best revision experience I’ve ever had. I know there are writers who do this all the time, but most of my writing has been directly to computer, except in instances where I’ve written passages in a notebook. This is material I really haven’t even looked at in five or so years. I knew this act was the strongest, but didn’t have active memory for most of what I’d actually written, and so I’ve been surprising myself. There’s been some of the material I’ve completely rewritten, and some I’ve tweaked considerably. And again, this is the sort of thing a lot of writers do anyway, as a matter of course. I’ve been getting into legitimate revision with some of my projects in recent years, but this feels like a whole different level. If I had this kind of time previously, and printed works-in-progress, probably this is what I would have been doing all along, especially seeing how it plays out. Always looking to grow.

On Sunday it will be one year since my niece, the Burrito, moved to Texas. It’s weird living a life where I’m not actively devastated by this, because I know intellectually I absolutely am. It helps to be working with kids, even in these current conditions. Losing my niece is second only to gaining her in the first place in terms of significant life developments for me. That’s how important she is, the void she left behind, how much I wish she were still an everyday part of my life, how much I want to be there for her, to help in any manner I can. One year, and this is still only the beginning. What’s it going to be like in five years? Ten years? Will I still be considered important to her? 

The effects of the pandemic are still only in their infant stages. We don’t know, for instance, just how dramatically this will have affected movie theaters. For people like me, who if I had the money would probably see every movie, just...every movie, released in theaters, this is cause for considerable concern. But my niece is a more significant question. That’s where I am, in terms of the pandemic.

A Journal of the Pandemic #11

I guess I kind of waited for this latest week to be over to write another update.  Work was weird.  We went back to the one-on-one-off schedule, although technically a version of that was supposed to happen last week except instead of working two days I worked all five for a number of reasons, although by the end of the week I was quite okay with that, as I got to work with a baby who as it turned out made some excellent progress in the month or so since I'd last seen her.  What's frustrating about that is that from the little feedback I was able to get from other coworkers (we're working single-ratio and so not really working with each other these days), the same fog that tends to penetrate perceptions still claims this particular baby, a "problem" baby in that she craves a certain level of security.  I never understand why this is so hard to grasp.  This week I saw a version of this difficulty play out with another baby (part of an adorable set of twins I was particularly anxious to see again!) who cried at unfamiliar faces.  Both twins were unusually stranger-danger prone, but that's kind of to be expected in these unusual times, right?  Except this coworker (who, to be clear, was not the same one as mentioned earlier) went out of their way not to help her feel at ease.  A huge part of the problem anyone, parents, caregivers, seems to face is the irrational approach to "problem" kids.  If it's a simple solution (putting in the effort to make them feel comfortable) it's almost as if that's the worst possible suggestion to these people.  If it's a difficult solution (dealing with truly problematic behavior) it's as if the automatic response is to give in to the behavior, which only ever enforces it and makes it more difficult to handle, both for those caving in to the behavior and those left dealing with the results...

Anyway, so out of four work days this week (Monday was Memorial Day, for those either unfamiliar with American holidays or still adrift in the sea of days), on this one-on-one-off schedule, I actually worked...two days!  And it turned out to harder than working every day.  When you work in an environment where your coworkers can't be counted on to perform adequately (which can literally be any environment and is therefore every environment), it's tough relying on others, bad enough when you have to work alongside them, worse when you're left picking up the strange (at best) pieces they leave behind.  That was this week. 

I guess part of it was that in getting those days off this week, it began to remind me of how strange these pandemic days really are.  When it was the month sitting at home, at least then I could adjust on my own terms, and didn't need to react to whatever anyone was doing (even on social media I've been getting more fed up recently, possibly because hysteria is returning to the news cycle, one way or another, and this never plays out well on social media).  Now it's an attempt to continue those strange listless days and incorporate the demands of work, sporadically, back in.  And it's difficult, especially when on my days off I expected to be called in, as happened last week, although it caused more anxiety at the end of a shift than waiting in the morning to receive word.  I talked briefly with a dad last week about this kind of uncertainty.  Even though he'd spent the last month working every day, he suggested knowing he was working every day was probably easier.

I got in one of the masks I'd ordered, and it was...not worth having ordered.  Again, I got masks before I went back to work, locally, Pat, so I no longer needed those masks, and thank goodness!  I know at least one of the two remaining masks arriving in the mail at some point will be equally worthless, because it was from the same company.  I didn't like the elastic ear loops anyway, so I'm glad one of them instantly detached.  How does anyone wear that style??? The local ones are all cloth and are not at all a bother to wear, except if you're breathing heavily and wearing glasses and...But what're the chances of that?  I figure it'll be worth having these worthless masks anyway, as a souvenir of the pandemic era.  I seriously doubt Americans are going to be wearing masks indefinitely, no matter how long it persists in the relative future.

I sent along two more stories to my WriteClubCo pal in Colorado, including one I wrote inspired by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, the TV adaptation of which I was finally watching when Gaiman's Twitter account reminded me the book was now thirty years old.  On Twitter if you're a creator you constantly retweet every reference to your work, or so seems to be the case with everyone I follow.  Gaiman kept doing that until the unfortunate business of his split with Amanda Palmer.

Anyway, I finished my Marvel Girl: Like A Phoenix comics script project over at Sigild, and while Pat was not amused it accomplished everything I wanted it to.  (That's two projects in a row Pat didn't like.  Oh well.)  I didn't want to write a particularly long script project this time.  I came up with more material for Marvel Girl than I actually used (I only realized last night that I never revisited one particular character I introduced, and if one were to find a plot hole that character would be it, but then I realized, I said so little about them I could easily change what they were supposed to be and it wouldn't affect anything at all, or actually improve the whole thing to do so), a lot of character concepts that were originals but whose roles would only have diverted from the plot or needlessly extended it.  Anyway, it's always fun to work on something.

In other news, I might finally begin transcribing the manuscript for In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote and printed out at work five or so years back and so one paper copy is all I have of it.  I learned of a contest a few days back but have no time to credibly write something new, so I might tackle the transcription project with one of Pangaea's three acts.  The first and third acts are the ones I'm constantly wondering about anyway, the second the one I've consistently been most pleased about, and the one I wrote most about here back then.  With Marvel Girl done and less interest in wasting time on social media, I think I'm ready to tackle more ambitious material at last.

Finally, the way this week worked out, I started with a three-day weekend and now ending it with one.  I hope to use that time wisely.  Hopping onto a wifi connection always helps, rare as it is these pandemic days.  Now to go leave some rare comments on other people's blogs...

Crisis Weekly...week three!

The third installment of Crisis Weekly is up. Find it here.

This week was a little bit of a departure narratively.  It's the story of a school shooting.  No bats, no mention of White Martians.  As school shootings go, I figured it was worth introducing the topic on its own.

Obviously these things have been happening.  The first time I remember one was back in 1999 with Columbine.  We talked about it at track practice.  The Matrix had opened, and people wanted to blame Neo and company for looking all swank while they shot up buildings.  But we know school shootings don't happen because of The Matrix.  The Matrix isn't cool anymore, and yet the shootings keep happening.

So I decided to include it in this story.  Yes, it's also the third crisis in a row in a series with "crisis" in the name, and a DC story, where "crisis" tends to be the operative word.  But this one seems like one of the worst crises of the modern era, and everyone has an explanation, even today, for why they keep happening.

All I knew is that I had to write about it.  I processed Katrina like that, in the unpublished manuscript In the Land of Pangaea.  And I'll probably process the recent Hurricane Michael.  I have friends who were personally impacted by that one, and I have experience in the area affected by it, and it's still weird to think about that.  Writers process by writing.  It's what we do. 

This will probably be the toughest week to read.

Song Remains the Same release

The second volume from my Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology series has been released, in paperback and Kindle editions.

Included is the first publication of my Tim Laflamme stories, a character also featured in my In the Land of Pangaea manuscript and The Pond War project, who will also be the focus of two short tales to be included in the WriteClubCo anthology to appear at some future date.

The other story is from David Perlmutter, who previously contributed to "Project Mayhem," the first volume in the series.  Perlmutter is incredibly prolific and has landed an incredible number of stories in various anthologies.  

The Submissions page has been updated with information about the next anthology, "Barbarian Translation," which focuses on variations of The Iliad.

IWSG December 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group released the book it had members help create.  You can read about that here.

I'll use this meeting to wrap-up my year in writing.  Technically I made horrendous progress in my attempt to make people pay me for writing.  I sold virtually no books and publishers were as usual completely uninterested in me and my inadequate attempts to convince them to think otherwise.  I released a book in February and the one person who read it hated it.  I mean hated it.  Can I emphasize that any more?  Hated it!!!

So, as far as my ego went in 2014, it probably has a number of bruises still looking to heal up.

But the thing is, I think this was an incredibly crucial year.  I worked on a number of projects and had some breakthroughs that could very well lead to that golden future I aspire to.  Yay me and all that.  I'm not even just about talking my fiction.  One of the biggest projects of several big projects I tackled this year came at the very start, something I finished after starting a year ago this month, a complete Bible commentary, something I hadn't even intended to do when I decided to finally read the Bible all the way through for the first time.  I'm thinking of releasing that as a book.  If any significant readership materialized for it, I'd probably have to talk myself out of a lot of controversy, but I'm okay with that.  I more than okay.  I'm at a point in my life where I need to start asserting myself.

The Star Wars project was a personal triumph and came with great creative fulfillment, and that's as much as any writer should ever really hope to expect.  I think the more I pushed to finish it before the end of the year the harder I made it for the few readers who cared to continue doing so.  That's okay.  The "comic strip" I'm wrapping up soon went the same way.  Early in the year I had a wealth of support, but it vanished the longer it went on.  But for me, it represents closure, having finally figured out the full shape of a story I've been trying to tell since high school.

I finished writing a very long novel in the early months, and then tackled the start of a very short one in the closing ones.  (Maybe I'll still finish the draft of that one before the end of the year.  It doesn't matter.  Circumstances I won't discuss here drastically affected the shape of the whole year, and my ability to continue writing as I normally would.)

And various insights on old projects as well the conceiving of new projects entirely.

But I should stress that 2014 also walloped me good!  One anthology that would've been the culmination of a writing group filled with people I knew in another lifetime vanished.  Another seems destined, officially, to go nowhere.  The last of three comic book biography scripts has been spinning wheels looking an artist for more than a year now.  I failed completely in a writing contest, not even being selected to enter the voting rounds.  And I know with absolute certainty that if I expect anyone to randomly find my books on their own, much less like them, I can probably sell myself a bridge, too (but don't worry, it's a nice one with historic value and a whole ode dedicated to it by the poet Hart Crane).

Maybe next year I'll have better things to report...

IWSG November 2014: My Insane NaNoWriMo Approach This Year!

For this month's Insecure Writers Support Group post, like more than a few others I'm actually going to discuss NaNoWriMo a little.

National Novel Writing Month is the insane time of the year when you get to learn exactly what kind of writer you really are by powering through 50,000 words in a thirty-day span.  This was something I officially tackled in 2004-2006, which led to The Cloak of Shrouded Men, my first book , and unofficially been completing while writing various other books starting in 2009, including last year when I started on In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote about here at the time and apparently that helped inspire Michael Abayomi this year, which is pretty cool.

This year I'm being totally insane.  Back in 2011 I managed to write chapters of The Whole Bloody Affair (also known as the Yoshimi Trilogy) in 10,000-word increments.  The idea, if it is at all possible in reality, is to try and nearly double that, with 18,000 words with each chapter as I tackle The Pond War, my War of 1812 tale that's a mash-up with the Tim Laflamme character originally introduced in Land of Pangaea.  It's my bid at Alice in Wonderland and every other story like it (Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, etc. etc. etc.), except the fantasy will actually be in the real world and brutal reality through the door to the other side.

Why am I writing, or attempting to write so many words each day?  Because I figured out I could when I needed to write a lot of words last year.  Whole Bloody Affair was training ground.  The more experience I have writing, the more I'm aware of what I'm comfortable writing, and Pond War is something I've been developing, or in other words thinking about, for much of this year.  I'm feeling confident.  Ridiculously overconfident?

We'll see!

IWSG July 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group meets on the first Wednesday of every month (except that one).

The book I've been reading, an advance copy of Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves, has gotten me thinking about the Great American Novel.  I wonder how many writers even still think about such a thing.  I've been trying to figure out why Thomas's book has such incredible hype surrounding it, because it's really not very good, and the only thing I can figure is, because writers in general don't really think about the Great American Novel anymore.

We've become a niche generation.  A hundred years ago this would have been unthinkable.  Of course, a hundred years ago writers were busy laying the foundation for exactly what we've become, but they approached it differently.  They approached the idea of genre as a lens by which to view the real world.  I think we cracked that lens a long time ago.  I think we have no concept that the lens ever existed at all.

So we have generations of writers, especially the current one, where all they think about is storytelling that has no real interest in talking about things that matter.  When someone like Thomas comes along, a new voice (because so many of our esteemed writers are old voices), and he tackles the real world, the literary community gets carried away with itself.  I think that explains Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, too.  Because that's not a very good book, either.  It's the same thing the Academy Awards try to do every year when they award Best Picture, find the movie that speaks to what we're thinking of ourselves now, a commentary that defines our times.

In other words, the whole idea of the Great American Novel.  The idea that we can reach beyond ourselves, our own petty interests, and be expansive, be grand, be great.  Not just write for the sake of writing, but try and say something, express something.

I've stumbled around with this in my own writing.  Pale Moonlight was my first real attempt to tackle it, and so I guess that's another reason I'm especially sensitive about it.  When I wrote In the Land of Pangaea, I embraced the challenge a little more directly.  Some of the projects I have lined up will try to be even more direct about it.

I have no idea what the Great American Novel actually is.  I think it's an ideal, one we hardly recognize even when it happens.  Something like We Are Not Ourselves comes along, and critics fall all over themselves to embrace it, laud it, exaggerate its worth.  Because it's one of the central conceits of being an American, that at our best we write the best.  But it seldom seems to actually happen.

Just something to consider.

On the Docket 2014

• Holy Men - Another manuscript that has undergone a number of different titles.  This is my Adam/Eve/Cain/Abel story and was originally started Fall 2010.  I've been contemplating self-publishing it in the near future.
• Book of Doom - A project cobbled together from story fragments I've had for years, including "Tug Rushmore," the book I wanted to write after graduating college.  Was one of two books I considered making my Fall 2014 manuscript.
• Space Corps Book 2: The Dark Riders - This is the second.  The first book in this series, Seven Thunders, was the manuscript I started Fall 2012.  Dark Riders and Book 3, The Fateful Lightning, are the two oldest outlined concepts in the Space Corps saga, while Seven Thunders was always the showcase centerpiece (and is my latest attempt to win the interest of an actual publisher).  Recently I've been revisiting Riders and Lightning, looking for ways to not only improve them but also make them more similar to what Thunders ultimately became.  That's resulted in somewhat radical character revisions for at least three characters (probably four) though not necessarily anything different in their arcs.  (Context is everything.)
• In the Land of Pangaea - The Fall 2013 manuscript is sitting in a drawer.  Not figuratively, as most of my manuscripts do, but in an actual drawer because at the moment it exists only in a single print copy that I sometimes dread WILL BE LOST TO AN INEXPLICABLE AND PROBABLY NOT LIKELY (???) DISASTER.  When will this one move forward?  It's anyone's guess (although somewhere within the 21st century would be a better one than others you might suggest).
• Song Remains the Same - This is something that kind of became a spin-off of Pangaea, specifically the last section (the blatantly autobiographical one).  Features the same set of characters in different permutations and interpretations.  I stopped writing this one about 60% into it, and I kept expecting to continue at some point, but at a certain point, I realized it was actually a good thing to stop when I did.
• 101 Star Wars Variations - Pretty much the same as the above, but with Star Wars characters instead.  I sketched out the complete list at the start of the year, and hope to have them all written by the end of the year.  If I'd written a mere two a week from the start, I'd be in pretty good shape right now, but I didn't, and so I'll be playing catch-up (although I'm too lazy to do the math, I won't really know or care when I don't have to anymore).  So far this has been great fun.
• Belle York - This is the Fall 2014 manuscript.  It's an idea my sister gave me.  She's long been a Beauty and the Beast fan, and so it seems natural that her idea was for me to write my version of the story.  The ideas started flooding, and so I was able to fashion it pretty quickly into my own idea.  Like Seven Thunders it's going to return to the War of 1812.  I'll likely be writing more about this one in the months ahead.
• Foundlings - This is another book I will work on at some point, my version of the JFK/LHO story (if you don't know one of those acronyms off-hand, you certainly know the other).
• Zooropa - An actual book that brings together a number of disparate concepts (a lot like Book of Doom) that I've been serializing in crude comic strip form all year long, which thanks to having a (series of) notebook(s) where I record all my ideas, I was recently reminded that the conclusion I'd formulated for the comic strips is not the actual ending.  I sometimes dabble in comic writing.  This will hopefully be my first comic novel, which will not completely shame the late Douglas Adams, who was the obvious inspiration for how it all began.

The Part About Endings

I just read a good ending, in Jerome Charyn's The Seventh Babe, and so it got me thinking about the subject.  As a writer, this is a particularly compelling subject.  It's about as important as the name of the story, the names of the characters.

The way I ended The Cloak of Shrouded Men, for instance, was crucial to the whole story.  When I originally wrote this one, it was during the course of three successive NaNoWriMos, so it's perhaps more accurate to say that I wrote three endings.  The first, after "Colinaude, the Angry Avenger," came about because I realized the main character was headed in a dark direction.  He kills a man.  Considering the main character is a superhero, this is a fairly significant event for him.  The second, after "Repose of the Eidolon," was less of an ending because by that point I knew I was going to be writing the character again.  That ending was more of a beginning, as the character dons his superhero costume again for the first time since the end of "Angry Avenger."  The whole of the third, "Cotton's War," is one long ending.  Actually, it takes place after the ending, the climactic fight the character must experience in order to complete his experiences in the story.  The fight apparently leaves him at death's door, only for an eleventh hour reveal that he's switched places with someone else, and that he's been comfortably observing the results of his response to killing a man from 'Angry Avenger."  His morality has flipped.  He has decided that the only way to respond to a world that no longer makes sense to him is to reshape the landscape.  It is a little like my version of Watchmen in that sense, except there's no belief that he has won a war so much as completed, well, a story.

That was my first attempt at concluding a novel.  The next one, Pale Moonlight, was a little trickier.  The whole story became a study about ideas.  Everything about it is less a traditional story and more a confrontation with 20th century psychology in the wake of some of the greatest horrors history has ever seen.  It's what happens when the climactic battle becomes more about one side walking away.  Who does that?  So the character who is supposed to walk away dies instead.  Of the three protagonists who confront the villain, one of them symbolizes the effort to understand evil, another the effort to reject, and the third the effort to confront it directly, which is to say contradict it.  This is what a lot of people have been trying to argue recently, that instead of picking a fight you pacify the enemy.  Except I'm ambivalent as to how easy that really is.  So if I'm to write a story about it, I write about what I imagine has to happen in order for it to work.  It's such a convoluted story, I'm sure I won't have any readers for it basically ever.  I guess that's why it had absolutely no traction with publishers.

So I went in a different direction with the next novel, which I'm seriously considering self-publishing this year.  I've previously referred to it as Minor Contracts and its original title, Ecce Homo, but it's now going by Holy Men.  This is the first time I've written a long-form story without having some kind of climactic fight at the end.  Like Pale Moonlight, it's a story of ideas, a much more direct grappling with my religious beliefs.  I knew exactly how this one would end from the moment I started writing it, which was why I named it Ecce Homo originally, Latin for "Behold the man!," which is what Pontius Pilate utters to the crowd after having Jesus scourged.  Except the man in my story isn't Jesus, but Adam, who is pleading with God to give his son Cain a second chance.  Really???  It's a story that needs to be read to be understood, and this is something I knew from the moment I started writing it, so it's actually one of my clearer narratives.  Swear to god!

From there, I wrote The Whole Bloody Affair, which was my version of a young adult novel, following the adventures of warrior orphan Yoshimi.  Since the whole premise of this one involved fighting, I knew the climax definitely involved a fight.  And so I peppered the book with a lot of short fights.  It was originally my idea to have the climax feature another one, because I don't choreograph very well.  I have to think a lot about it.  It's the whole reason the superhero in Cloak of Shrouded Men does very little actual fighting.  So I end up thinking of such moments more as set pieces, the way movies center a lot of their stories around specific moments, usually action scenes.

That's what happens in Seven Thunders, which is the first book I think other people might actually want to read.  I've been foolish enough recently to send it to a publisher.  It's the linchpin to my whole Space Corps saga.  Whatever else I write, this is still what I think will be my legacy.  It took me fifteen years and three prior manuscripts to even attempt writing Seven Thunders.  And it was the same movie that ended up informing the fighting in Whole Bloody Affair that ultimately gave me the shape of it, including the ending.  I'm talking about Warrior, the best MMA movie that will ever be made.  It's the story of two brothers and their father, all of them estranged, all of whom converge back into each other's lives thanks to a tournament.  The brothers end up meeting in the finals.  It's seriously one of the best movies I've ever seen.  Seven Thunders is also a story about brothers.  I knew that whatever else I did in the story, I needed the ending to ring as true emotionally for me as Warrior's did.  I'd dreamed about this ending for so long.  Previously it played out a little like the lightsaber duels of the Star Wars prequels.

Endings aren't always my strong suit.  Half the reason I spent a few years doing micro fiction was so that I had to tackle endings on a regular basis, the beginning so close to the ending that there could be no mistake as to how one met the other.  As a reader, I've developed an instinct for how a story's shape looks.  I happen to be partial to stories that end well, not just begin well.  I hear all this stuff about how a story has to begin well, but that's perhaps the least important part of a story.  I've read plenty of bad beginnings that quickly turn into excellent middles.  But how many excellent endings?

Sometimes, when I want to end a story without having really finished writing it, I simply conclude with the overall effect the events of the story have ended up having. That's what I did with "Lost Convoy" from the Monorama collection.  Last summer my laptop died on me.  It ate the ending of Seven Thunders.  Not the ending, but the coda.  With that one, it was as important to do a proper ending as explain what happened after it.  I guess bringing the lessons of Cloak of Shrouded Men and later efforts full circle.  Luckily my sister helped the computer regurgitate the coda.

With the manuscript I've recently completed, In the Land of Pangaea, there are three separate stories that are nonetheless interrelated, and so once more I needed a coda to bring it all together satisfactorily.  I've also been working on Zooropa all year, which is another way I've been meditating on endings recently.  Zooropa is the title I've given a series of stories I've been working on for about as long as Space Corps.  It encompasses "Leopold's Concentration" and several other stories from Monorama, and several that aren't in it.  When I tackled "Eponymous Monk," a serialized quasi-cartoon strip I recently completed over at Scouring Monk, I knew I still wasn't completing that story.  So when it came to thinking up a theme for this year's A-to-Z Challenge, I determined that it only made sense to use the Zooropa world, which was all I needed to finally reach the conclusion, which will come in the form of "Shooks Run," from an outline I actually completed last year, without realizing where the story would be by this point.  (If you're interested in my A-to-Z, it'll be at the Monk, as always.)
 
So I will soon have the shape of that whole story completed, including its ending, which may seem to be a little out of left field, the way Cloak of Shrouded Men and Pale Moonlight end.  I'm not regressing, though.  I wonder if I will rewrite the whole Zooropa saga one day.  But for now, it's enough to know I finally have its ending, because that's something that has eluded me for close to two decades.  Which is incredibly frustrating for a writer who has made endings so important to his stories.  But all the sweeter for finally having reached it.

The People vs. Epiphany

I can get a little ticked off sometimes.  Sometimes, I'm not very patient with other people.  Mostly it's because I sense the presence of intellectual cowards.

Those who anger me the most are people who take the easy way out when they react to a work of fiction, whether it be a book, a TV show, a movie.  They anger me because they end up walking the fine line between narrative and epiphany.  Narrative is what most people want from a story.  They want a beginning, a middle, and an end.  They want, in short, a story about a complete journey, and the reason they want it is because they believe that every story has that, and not just every story but every person.  We're told constantly that we must become something.  If we're not something then we're nothing.  The more something we are, the more important we are.  The less something we are the more we allow ourselves to be labeled as insignificant, both by others and even by ourselves.

And to a certain extent, that's both a healthy and natural reaction to living.  That's why it's entirely common for stories to feature narratives with those definite beginnings and endings.

But it's the middle where the interesting things happen.  The middle is the epiphany.  It's okay to mistake the beginning as the epiphany, but the beginning is really just an imperative.  The imperative means nothing without resulting in something.  Where I disagree with people is that the result is the conclusion.  No, the result is the epiphany.

The epiphany of a journey is the defining moment of a person's life, when they realize the journey they're on.  If you think about it, the journey itself has so many starting points that to pick one at all is to pick at random, because the starting point you identify still needed to have conditions necessary to allow it to happen, and those conditions are already present well before you're born, and involve people you will never know, even from your own times.

The epiphany isn't the ending, either, because there never is an ending, but rather an arbitrary conclusion that satisfies the arbitrary beginning, if the story is a good one an exact mirror.

But without the beginning or the ending, what is the point of the epiphany?

The point is everything.  The point is, without the epiphany a person is meaningless.  Without the epiphany the story is meaningless.  It's a random series of events that have no personal attachments.  It's all the network TV shows everyone claims they don't take seriously, so that all the cable TV shows that in fact focus heavily on narrative are all the ones people respect.  Yet these cable shows are equally meaningless without the epiphany.  I consider the critical darling Breaking Bad to be meaningless without Walter White having ever confronted the journey he undertook.  The decision to deal meth was not an epiphany.  It was merely a beginning, and not a very good one.  One doesn't decide to radically change one's life merely on the diagnosis of a terminal illness.

The epiphany is something that in a honest story, or an honest life, may not be properly understood by the individual in question.  This is keenly evident in recent films like Saving Mr. Banks and Winter's Tale (if both happen to feature the actor Colin Farrell, it's because he's the rare actor who has realized the importance of such an element to the roles he chooses).  Saving Mr. Banks might be construed as a movie about making the good guy look like the bad guy (as I saw it described recently).  Or it might more accurately be described as an epiphany perhaps only the audience is best suited to comprehend (I wrote a great deal about this movie here).  Winter's Tale cleverly suggests the whole narrative is really an equally challenging example of epiphany for its audience.

Ambitious TV shows are often challenges like that.  The ones I admire are the ones that remain true to this exploration.  Lost is the perfect example, and one of the many reasons fans eventually became disillusioned with it might be this disconnect.  On the surface it would seem obvious the whole point of the show was to figure out how the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 would get off the mysterious island, with or without discerning its secrets.  But it was really about characters whose lives had already passed the point of epiphany, and these experiences the series chronicles were ways for them to process the epiphany, certainly not the epiphany itself.

Other shows challenged the relationship between epiphany and narrative.  The whole first season of Heroes was about epiphany.  The rest of the series took epiphany as an ongoing narrative.  When most fans assumed the characters had reached their cathartic, definitive (or, concluding) moment at the end of the first season, the series continued for three more seasons, continuing to explore the matter of epiphany, where the characters came from and where they were going.  The whole series was already a challenge to the traditional notion of what a superhero is supposed to be.  There were never any costumes.  Even the last episode, which reached an appropriate echo from the start of the series, didn't reach an ending, but rather another epiphany.

Prison Break was the same way.  The whole series challenged the notion that a defining event, or epiphany, was the only thing to explore about its characters.  The first season was the prison break.  But that was hardly the end of the story.  If the end occurred somewhere near the beginning, then it was indeed a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

I've tried to write like this even when I didn't realize I was doing it.  Maybe that's why I've had such a hard time convincing other people to take my writing seriously.  Actually, the whole of my short fiction collection Monorama is about this, and I didn't realize that when I was writing any of that material, either.  My WIP has reached the part where I'll be writing about a life in transition.  If people crave narrative, they crave definition most of all.  They don't want to be told there isn't an ending.  They want the complete arc explained right away.  They think that something that doesn't have a definition attached means nothing.

Maybe they're right.  As for me, the meaning isn't in the definition, but how it's used.  An epiphany is something in motion.  It's on the move.  In the Land of Pangaea is a story of three lives, the first two being dramatic examples of traditional narrative, the third an exploration of a story with no ending.  I've long struggled with another manuscript, which I have finally decided to release on my own, which I now call Pale Moonlight but has previously been entitled Modern Ark and Finnegan, which began as an idea about vampires, but became something else.  It became more ambiguous.  It in fact because my first study of epiphany, when I discovered that the characters I was writing didn't have traditional narratives attached to them.  It takes the shape of narrative, but it breaks all the rules.  I don't have the arc of the main character explained at all.  The epiphany is something in the eye of the observers, and perhaps of the reader as well.

And for this, I look around and see how uncommon this is, to write like this, to think like this.  And, yes, it causes me anger.  I'm not really angry with other people.  I'm angry that when anyone tries to explore this idea of the epiphany, it doesn't really help others.  And really, it shouldn't.  You can't force an epiphany.  All you can do is provide the opportunity.

And perhaps that's why I write.

IWSG January 2014

I'm experiencing a small hiccup in my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea.

I've completed the first and largest section of the manuscript, and that's all well and good.  That's the most important part of the story.  The section I haven't started yet is the shortest.  But it might also be the trickiest.  You see, I'm writing about Hurricane Katrina.  The main characters are black.

I am not myself black.  I've written black main characters before.  Actually, the whole cast of characters in Cloak of Shrouded Men is black, basically (it really only becomes apparent in the third section of that one, but I treat it as a complete nonissue otherwise).  I've written other ethnic characters, too, such as Yoshimi.  Katrina is a major exception to this rule, though.  It's a topic that breached a considerable amount of controversy in the halls of American racial identity.  Then-President Bush was accused of responding slowly to the devastation it caused because it affected mostly blacks.

This is something I will have to address.  For whatever reason, Katrina has stuck with me, even though I've never lived anywhere near the affected area, never had family even remotely close until last year when my brother and his wife moved to Louisiana (although far away from any relevant locations).  It was another of those epochal moments in Bush's presidency.  Don't hate me when I say I have a favorable opinion of him.  People tend to react negatively to bad situations (for some reason!), and they always look for someone to blame.  I've tended to believe that Bush got the reaction he did to that moment because of this instinct.

Be that as it may, it is something I need to address in the story.  Some of it I've drawn from the excellent movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, which doesn't really address the racial undertones of Katrina's impact even though it features a mostly black cast.  The main character in this section of Pangaea is mostly concerned with locating his missing wife after they're separated during the storm.

But he will have to address the same thing Spike Lee did in When the Levees Broke.  The government response to the disaster was found to be inadequate.  I tend to get inside the head of my characters.  This will have to factor into the main character's thinking, no matter what else he may focus on.

Am I at all qualified to address such things?  The fact that I've been thinking about Katrina since it hit in 2005 means I still have to process it for myself.  It's not surprising that it ended up in the plotting of one of my stories.  At the very least it will be one of my biggest challenges to date, to do justice to something that drastically changed so many lives and unexpectedly spoke to far more than a conversation about severely bad weather.

I hope I'm up to the task.  Sometimes it's hard just to represent my own people, if you'll allow me to talk about ethnic identity in a broader context.  I've written before about being a Franco American who feels he's a generation removed from understanding what that means.  That will play a part in the third section of Pangaea, certainly.  I've never written a manuscript, part or a whole, from this perspective.  A large part of the reason I wanted to write Pangaea at all was so I could finally do that.  Maybe writing about Katrina will help make that easier.

I don't know.  I can only try.

Done in the actual time of Pangaea

I've been working on my current WIP, In the Land of Pangaea, since November (it was the subject of my unofficial NaNo effort, you may recall).  Yesterday I concluded the first draft for the first and longest section of the book, the part that takes place in the eponymous supercontinent.  I ended up being damn happy with how it developed, which made it easier and easier to write as time went on.

That leaves the second section, which is the shortest, and the third, which is the final (I'm a sucker for three-act structures, which is the basic shape nearly all of my manuscripts have taken, with so far the lone exception being Minor Contracts, which has a general medley of five narrative threads, one of which is a tapestry of different, illustrative voices).  I hope to be done, as I think I've said previously, by the end of February on the complete first draft.  I will certainly let you know how that works.  It's a fantastic feeling, though, knowing that I did exactly what I wanted to do, and am pleased with the results, which ended up turning into a murder mystery, something I've only tackled on occasion.  I blame it on all the John le Carre books I was reading at the time I started writing...

Yoshimi returns? (a blatant plea for artistic collaborators)

I'm currently looking for artistic collaborators on comic book projects.  I'm lousy at making these connections, so I'm making a blatant plea right here.  If you want to humor me, here's your chance.

It's funny, too, because with all my rotten luck breaking into comics, the last missed opportunity ended up providing me with a major plot element for my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea.  Based on a scenario originally envisioned by artist Don Bryan and further developed by me, I tried to keep the project alive (read an aborted effort here) until I totally repurposed it.  That's all well and good, but at the time I really wanted it to remain a comic book.

The couple of Bluewater biography scripts I've had published have only whet my appetite.  I want to do some original work now.  I want to do it badly.  I want to work in the sandboxes of other people, too.  Mainly, I want this creative outlet.

The (main) title of this post references Yoshimi, who's the featured protagonist of The Whole Bloody Affair, the source of another tortured march to publication.  I've been wondering if there was ever going to be another Yoshimi story.  The dramatic arc of her life completed itself before she hit sixteen years old, so I wondered what could possibly justify bringing her back.  And then it struck me.  She doesn't have to be the main character.

So that's how she appears in my initial notes for Boxer, one of the comic book projects I've cooked up and would love to develop with an artistic collaborator, maybe shop around to publishers (because most of them really love not having to do that themselves, the creative team for a project they didn't come up with).  Boxer is my high school drama.  The main character is the eponymous figure, and she's not herself a boxer.  That's her mom.  Her story is about establishing a legacy of her own, which is funny because that contrasts so well with Yoshimi's unexpected return.  There's another character who's the narrator, sort of like how Brian K. Vaughan has cleverly made a star out of the narrator in his Saga.  This narrator also happens to dramatically affect the shape of the whole story, because this is her interpretation, and she sometimes lets her imagination get away with her.  (Yes, somehow all three leads are female.)

If I make a big deal out of my hopes for Boxer out of a half dozen other potential comic book projects, it's because this is the one I'd probably most like to see move forward first.

If you know anyone who could help me with this, let me know.  If you only want to wish me well, thank you for that as well!  Either way, this will be one of my major goals for 2014, just so you know, that along with finding a publisher for Seven Thunders, and maybe one or more of my other manuscripts.  2013 was hopefully the last push for my self-publishing efforts.  We'll see!

A NaNo triumph story

Yesterday I crossed the 50,000 mark in the words I've written for my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea.  This is significant because I wrote all the words in November, which is what you need in order to complete the NaNoWriMo challenge.

Since I didn't participate officially, I don't get a nifty winner's button to put here, but I'm still incredibly pleased to be able to report my success.  In all, I spent twelve of the preceding twenty-six days writing, sometimes as "few" as 3,000 words in a day and sometimes as many as 5,000.  My original schedule had me writing for more of those days, and finishing today, in time to devote Thanksgiving and Black Friday to family and the last day of the month to my regular weekends off, but I was informed that today wouldn't be a regular kind of day either, so I had to quickly compensate, which was why there were two 5,000 days and a couple of 4,500s, too.

Although certainly a great push in the overall effort, my plans call for more than a hundred thousand more words, which puts Pangaea at the longest manuscript I've written to date, a different kind of achievement entirely.  I figure if I stay at a fairly good clip I'll be done by February or March, and I will certainly let you know how that goes, but I wont beat myself up.  I said I wouldn't if I didn't hit the NaNo goal, and maybe I wouldn't have, but I don't have to worry about that anymore.

Back in the old days, when I only had the one blog (Scouring Monk), I wrote victory posts after each successful NaNo, explaining how that year's story came to be.  I won't be doing that here, but I figured I'd at least acknowledge the tradition.

I'll be taking a short break from the WIP, probably won't be writing again until Tuesday.  But I'm not worried at all about it.  I've got NaNo behind me.  I've made a good start.  Now I just have to finish it.

WIP/NaNo Update

Here we are on the 18th of the month, which happens to be NaNoWriMo, and I've got a WIP, In the Land of Pangaea.  According to a pace I've previously determined, I should be at 28,000 words, roughly, as of yesterday.  But I'm at 20,000.

Previous versions of me would have been in a panic.  Previous versions would be running around as a giant bundle of nerves, the way turkeys would be at this time of year if they realized how delicious they are at least once a year.  But then, because of previous versions of me, I'm behind but am already on my way to catching up.

When I did NaNo in 2004-06, I set a daily goal of 1,667 words per day in order to complete the challenge in November's 30 days (via cold calculation).  Anytime I didn't write on a given day, I knew I had to double that count the next day to catch up.  By the third year I was able to complete the challenge in far fewer than 30 writing sessions.  In the years that followed, I varied the length of my daily writing goals quite a bit, going so far as 10,000 per day in 2011, and then scaling back to 5,000 last year.  This year I intended to do about 3,000, but since I started falling behind I upped it to 4,000 and then to 4,500.  If I keep at this kind of pace on the weekdays I have available to write, I will hit the NaNo goal of 50,000 words in the month before Thanksgiving (and just who is this sadist Chris Baty to have organized the challenge in a month with a major family holiday in the first place???).

I've stated before that I'm not really concerned.  I haven't officially participated in NaNo since 2006.  I have no one watching over my shoulder except myself, and I guess you blogging readers, if you choose to be all judgmental and nasty about it.  But you guys are pretty okay.  You wouldn't do that.

As always, it's not the words but the sentences that increasingly interest me.  I love when a story that I think I know starts to take over.  While I plotted Pangaea fairly intricately two weeks ago, I like it when I discover new little bits of inspiration.  Pangaea has turned out to be an excellent way for me to meditate on other manuscripts I've written, a commentary and summation on those stories that will hopefully make all of them the easier to process, although each of them are completely independent, including Pangaea.

The only tough part remains that I know even after November ends I will still have plenty to write.  Which is also great fun to consider!

Why Neil?

So, why Neil Gaiman?

The short of it was that it was offered me and I was quick to embrace the opportunity.  The long of it, of course I'm a fan.  I didn't mention him in the Ode-athon, but Neil has been a huge inspiration to me.  His depiction of the trickster god Anansi has informed material in Minor Contracts, a manuscript I wrote three years ago, and is a considerable part of In the Land of Pangaea, my WIP.  Anansi was featured in Neil's American Gods and of course the subsequent Anansi Boys, and perhaps it's a sign of my affection for the character that I was never able to understand why people didn't like that one as much as I did.

Plenty of people love Neil's work.  I spent a good portion of this year reading his Sandman, and as I have yet to read the complete series (to say nothing of the new follow-up, Sandman Overture), I anticipate doing more of that in the future.  It's arguably the most literary comic book ever attempted, and the style hugely informed how I approached Modern Ark, a manuscript I wrote four years ago (what's easy to do in a comic book is not so easy to do in a book if you're looking for an actual audience; maybe I just need to identify my Morpheus more clearly?).  Since I didn't read Sandman as it was originally released issue by issue, even though I was actively reading comics during the second half of the series, it's been interesting to play catch-up.

Neil can sometimes be a little intimidating.  And yet I don't think he's hit his full cultural reach yet because I also think he can be underrated by people looking for a little more of the mainstream in his work (a problem that also plagues Grant Morrison).  Sometimes even as we champion artists who can make anything mainstream we limit our ability to find them by asking that they have a certain level of conformity to what already exists.  They see that Neil came from comic books and that's excuse enough to not take him as seriously as they should.

I haven't read enough of his work, Sandman or otherwise, even though I was still in high school when Neil started taking the art of writing books seriously.  That would have been a good time to start, but then I was still fighting my appreciation of Stephen King then, too.  I think Neil has a good amount of King in him, but they approach the same kind of material differently.  For Neil it's about seeing the grand scale on an intimate level, whereas King takes the intimate at a grand scale (which is why he can do horror and things like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption with equal aplomb).  But they're essentially the same.  They see the hidden mythologies around us and attempt to interpret them.  Clowns are scary, mm-hmm.

On the one hand having this comic biography under my belt means I'm an inch closer to working in comic books the way I always dreamed.  That's the selfish part.  On the other, I'm also an inch closer to Neil creatively.

But only an inch.