Writing In the Leviathan

About five years in the making, I'm finally tackling In the Leviathan.

This is the book based on my grandfather's life.  I've been working on research for it, and if I were a different writer, that's exactly what I would still be doing now, but one of the things I've realized over the past twenty years is that I am not a different writer, and I've been developing a style and viewpoint that I've grown comfortable utilizing.  

Most of what I've written has fallen into sci-fi/space opera, or some other subgenre.  I've tackled literary fiction (notably the Americana Trilogy, otherwise known as the Miss Simon books, which will still be revisited once I have the courage to tackle an even more ambitious book I've been developing for the same twenty-year span, which has gone by a number of titles, but the one listed as a label on this blog is Miss Simon's Doom, which seems to still work for me), but never like this, never so personally.

I pushed past the first six of twenty-one chapters last month, and now we'll just have to see how the rest goes.  With any luck I will write another one (or two!) later today.  The holdup is that this is a crucial chapter, the crux on which the narrative pivots, in which a full understanding of the main character, Montague, stands revealed, which is particularly important since this is also why I wanted to write this in the first place.

No pressure!

Space Corps...just putting it out there...

So anyone who has visited this blog recently knows that Terrestrial Affairs has been released, and that it's a Space Corps story.  I've got a Space Corps label where you can trace back every time I've mentioned it previously, and you can see without even looking at all that material that I've talked plenty about it.  A few years back, on another of my blogs, I spent a whole A-to-Z April exploring different characters and stories from the Space Corps saga, and that was well before I really had anything available to read.  Earlier this year I wrote a Space Corps story for the IWSG anthology contest, and it wasn't selected, but it kicked off a renewed sense of interest in finally getting Space Corps out in the open.

So I did something pretty radical.  I finally started using my Wattpad account, which I set up years ago, and began posting edited chapters of Seven Thunders.  (You can read them here.)  I finished the manuscript four years ago, and it's been sitting in a computer file, because I didn't know what to do with it.  This was the story I'd wanted to write since 1998.  It sat percolating for years, and in the meantime I started writing other novel-length stories, sort of figuring out what that was like.  I tried getting a number of them published, had no luck, and then started self-publishing them.  Then I lost all faith, basically, in my ability to be published traditionally, but I didn't want Seven Thunders to be dumped unceremoniously in anonymity, like the rest of my self-published material.  I suck at blogger networking.  I admit that.  I started blogging well before all the cool bloggers you read and/or are ever considered blogging.  But I blogged back then like I did anything else I wrote, which was just for the fun of it.  It wasn't until much later that I even thought visitors could be a real thing, when I randomly started getting comments about stuff I said about TV shows.  Then I found a community, and they were all writers, and they all supported each other and...

Well, I didn't really fit in.  Everyone I connected with, they didn't much care about how blogging was "supposed" to work, either, or we parted ways eventually, and so I never got that bump that everyone else in the community seemed to. 

But that's not really here nor there.  The point is, I got past that.  I started editing, and posting, Seven Thunders.  It's been interesting.  If I were to write Seven Thunders today, it would probably look a lot different.  Recently I've written a lot of much shorter works.  Seven Thunders was written when I had come across a formula for works of a certain length, and that was always my goal, and somehow I always hit it, one way or another.  But it always felt vaguely stifling, creatively.  The more I worked the shorter lengths, the more I saw the creative potential in that.  I'm not saying I don't stand by Seven Thunders, today.  Hey, I'm posting the thing once a week, over at Wattpad.  And I'm not saying the shorter works I've been doing are inherently better.  I'd like them to be longer.  Until Terrestrial Affairs I had gradually been pushing them to be longer.  Terrestrial Affairs, which I'm perfectly happy with, thank you, ended up being the length it is because I had a very short window in which to write it, and I was able to finish it in that window, but I didn't have a lot of time to punch it up to greater length, which meant I had to go with my first creative impulses, which is not something I normally like to do.  But again, it worked with Terrestrial Affairs, especially when I realized how the previously unrelated Wendale sequence fit into it.

I wasn't particularly updating this blog when I developed Wendale, so there isn't anything to see here about it, but I was mulling it through last summer, last fall, and on into winter, three seasons of development, evolution, only to discover what it really was, something embedded in something else, in the spring.  And while I had envisioned Wendale to be more like the Miss Simon stories I was doing last year, I'm actually happy that I was able to do that style but in a genre context as well, because that was what I'd been thinking through that period, too, but I couldn't quite decide how to do it.

I have no idea how interested anyone will be in Space Corps.  I have no idea if Terrestrial Affairs will be anymore successful than the other stuff I've self-published.  I have no idea if Seven Thunders will find an audience on Wattpad.  But I'm starting to not care.  Space Corps began on notebook pages, stuff I obsessively chronicled, for myself, because I wanted to see where the story would go.  Now, it seems to be looking around the public sector.  But nothing about it has changed, really.  I'm okay with that.

Miss Simon's Dime Novel now available!

 

This summer I've been hitting the books pretty hard...writing novellas, anyway, and Miss Simon's Dime Novel is the last of them.  Rounding out the Americana Trilogy, Miss Simon and her lover Jim Herbert have a discussion about that most hallowed of geek debates: whether or not it was cool for George Lucas to monkey around with the notion that Han Solo shot first.  To do so, Jim proposes examining a different story, a fictionalized account of early cowboy actors Jack and Al Hoxie (they stopped making movies roughly the same time John Wayne was making a name for himself), and a rivalry that results in another shootout (which, historically, never happened).  Does Jack Hoxie, the more successful of the two, shoot first, or his half-brother Al, who in real life was honored by the state of California for his role in ending a hostage crisis?

 

Jack's life was a crossroads of popular entertainment, straddling the line between the traveling Wild West shows of the 19th century and the dawn of Hollywood in the 20th.  He starred in numerous rodeos and circuses before and after his years making movies.  The closest you'd come to knowing anything about him now is Three Godfathers, a 1916 film featuring Harry Carey, a fact history remembers with the second remake from 1948 featuring John Wayne and Carey's son, Harry Carey, Jr., and later echoed by the smash 1987 comedy Three Men and a Baby; if Wikipedia, for instance, were properly edited, all of these connections would be so much easier to make.

 

Dime Novel plays fast and loose with the facts, but they're all present, from the fact that Jack's father was commonly known as Doc Hoxie, to his mother's name being Matilda Quick (seriously, the guy's parents had the best names), to his stepfather being accused of murder, to his early first marriage to a woman named Pearl and the second daughter he later had being named Pearl, too, to...It's a dime novel version of history, from a modern perspective, as close to Quentin Tarantino as I'll ever get.  This is the Western for modern times, with the myth ratcheted way up and the humanity even higher (if that makes any sense to you, then you're exactly my target audience).

 

Writing it was the perfect way to end the summer for me, building on everything else I'd worked on, pushing the word count a little upward (it's the longest story of the four I've written this year), and because it's a drama about two specific characters, the focus remains tighter than what I've done lately, too (actually, it's the first time I've ever done a long-form story with only two main characters, unless you count Leopold's Concentration). 

 

As always, available in paperback and ebook formats. 

Miss Simon's Brute released

 

 

I've finally concluded, and released, Miss Simon's Brute.  I've included with this post all the labels to where I've written about the development and history of this story here, but the most important thing for me is that this is a milestone for me. This is the story I was working on two Novembers ago, with the insane wordcount challenge I'd given myself, that I abandoned the day my mother was admitted to the nursing home where she'd die five months later, which began a lengthy writers block I hadn't been able to escape until this year. 

 

Brute is a version of the classic fable of Beauty and the Beast, which is a favorite of my older sister's, and I initially conceived of the project as a favor to her.  I set it during the War of 1812 (which has factored into other things I've written), specifically in the aftermath of the Battle of York, which precipitated the retaliatory burning of the White House.  The story ties together the lives of an Irish immigrant, an Indian orphan, a Canadian widow, and the eponymous individual, a hulking black man whose lynching motivates the shattered lives of the immigrant, orphan, and widow to find new purpose.  During the course of the story, hidden truths are revealed, such as who the Brute really is, which deepen its emotional impact.

 

Like Sapo Saga and Miss Simon's Moxie before it, Brute is a novella, a shorter work meant to focus my writing and give potential readers something meaty to sample.  Writing the earlier stories made it easier to finally work on and complete Brute, besides.

 

Brute also serves as a tribute to the writer Jerome Charyn, who through the support of Lenore Riegel has become all the more important in my life as one of the giants of literature, despite the fact that awareness of his efforts has remained at a minimum in the fifty years he's been producing his insights into the American psyche, past and present.  He often includes characters like the Brute in his stories, although for my version I chose to move the character front-and-center, whereas Charyn usually has him in support (unless he's Abraham Lincoln).  

You can buy paperback and ebook editions.

Miss Simon's Moxie is released

I've just released Miss Simon's Moxie, a political satire featuring Miss Simon and Tim Laflamme, two characters who've previously appeared in my fiction, as well as the soft drink Moxie, which is hugely beloved for reasons not entirely to be understood, and celebrated annually in my hometown of Lisbon, ME!  Paperback and ebook versions are available.

Writing this novella was part of my continuing efforts to get back into the swing of writing, and also having shorter things available for interested readers. 

No, that isn't Frank Anicetti on the cover, but it might as well be.  Frank recently retired as the proprietor the Kennebec Fruit Co., which was better known as the Moxie Store.  He's a living legend in Lisbon, and is directly responsible for the Moxie Festival that brings thousands of visitors to town every year (incidentally, this occurs on the second weekend of July, so this coincidental timing is also somewhat fortuitous). 

Even if you've never heard of Moxie, you can also construe the title to indicate Miss Simon herself, because the old gal certainly has moxie, too...

IWSG February 2016: Writer's Block

The first Wednesday of every month hosts the bloggers meeting of the Insecure Writers Support Group.

Today I'm going to talk about that most dreaded of subjects: writer's block.  This is something I'm very passionate about, because I think it's one of the most misunderstood aspects of writing.

You know how it is.  You want to write, but for whatever reason, you're completely unable to, not because you have too much demand for your time on other things, but because the words simply won't flow.  Writers tend to find this incredibly frustrating, and why shouldn't they?  Writers write.  Right.  They think there's something wrong with them.  And that's simply not the case.

I'm here to argue that writer's block is the most useful tool in a writer's arsenal. 

Pretty odd, right?  But it's absolutely true.  Have you ever heard a writer explain how after a certain point, a story just started to write itself?  It's one of the weirdest aspects of writing, but it's also the most telling one.  You can try and master a story yourself, but in the end it's the story itself that knows what it's doing, and every time you disagree, you end up with something less than what it could have been.  I have a theory that the weakest stories are the ones the writer forced the most to happen, and the strongest are the ones that, well, wrote themselves.

What does this have to do with writer's block?  This is the story trying to take over.  And the writer just won't let it.  It's essentially the writer getting in their own way and not even realizing it.  It's the story telling the writer that they have to take a break.  Yes, I'm literally saying that writer's block is a good thing, a necessary thing.  The more you embrace it, the better off you'll be.

Because this is the point where you realize new possibilities.  This is where the story becomes enriched, past the original idea and into a full-blown story.  Not a series of events.  A story.  This is what truly makes a writer, the ability to distance their own ego from their work.

A lot of writers depend heavily on support.  And this is a good thing.  This is the writer acknowledging, once again, that they need some extra help.  The story needs some work.  Not mechanically.  Okay, maybe sometimes mechanically.  But whatever the case, the best storytelling is the product of acknowledging that something isn't write.  It takes a humble writer to admit this.

Never take the reader's opinion for fact.  Never take a critic's opinion for fact.  If you've given the story the attention it needs, if you've allowed yourself to discover the authentic story, the right reader, the right critic will come along and figure out what you did, what the story did.  Readers can be wrong.  Critics can be wrong.

And most importantly, writers can be wrong.  That's what writer's block is telling you.  It's telling you that you need to step back and let the process work instead of trying to force it.  Again, you can always tell when this hasn't happened.  I'm not just talking about mechanics.  More writers than any of us will ever care to admit suck at mechanics.  Which is okay, because if you suck at mechanics but can somehow work around it, that's the story taking over, too, because the story will always know.

The story knows!

Sounds crazy, I know.  But it's my guiding principle.  And every time I've had writer's block, I've ended up with a story that feels more right than it did before.  I've been in writer's block on the latest story I'm working on, Miss Simon's Moxie (previously talked about here as Miss Simon's About the Moxie Incident).  Miss Simon is herself a significant piece of discovery in my writer's block, as I've talked about before.  She's become something of an inspiration machine.  A year or so ago, I was working on what has now become Miss Simon's Brute, and I'm only now beginning to see how important it is for her to be a part of that one, and why the recent idea for Miss Simon's Dime Novel was responsible for the breakthrough on Miss Simon's Moxie (and how all of them will help writing what's now Miss Simon's Doom so much easier when I get around to that).

No, I'm not trying to hook you on a series of Miss Simon books.  I'm just not that good enough at marketing.  But this is not a case of something that works for me working for you just because I'd like to believe so.

Historically, retelling stories has been a major part of storytelling in general.  More recently, I can think of one example where tackling the same subject has led to an incredibly richness that can only be understood by taking in all of the attempts.  This is another form of letting the story speak for itself, an idea that just won't go away.  To wit:

Consider the classic Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day.  You're probably familiar with it.  His character keeps experiencing the same day over and over again.  It's a terrible nightmare, but makes for a great movie. 

Now, two more recent examples of this idea are Source Code and Edge of Tomorrow.  I came to Source Code because I'd become a big fan of filmmaker Duncan Jones, who seems to be bursting with the same unique mindset as his father, the late David Bowie.  In it, Jake Gyllenhaal, yes, keeps experiencing the same day over and over again.  This time it's because he's been drafted by a military program that's using him to test out a new machine that will hopefully be able to prevent disasters.  The whole experience is pretty transcendental for reasons I don't necessarily need to get into here.

Anyway, then there's Edge of Tomorrow, in which Tom Cruise, yes, experiences the same day over and over again.  I finally got around to seeing this one because of all the positive chatter it received despite a rather tepid box office response.  There came a point where I realized I'd seen something like it before. No, not Source Code or Groundhog Day, but The Matrix Reloaded.

What?  Really? you're asking me, incredulous. 

Really.  This was the second movie in the Matrix trilogy.  It was also the first of two massive disappointments for fans transfixed by the first one's suggestion that there's a good explanation for why life is so disappointing, and it involves lots of kung fu and explosions!  Fans found the second and third films ultimately unnecessary attempts to duplicate the first one.  I never saw them that way.  What fans expected was to have the first one fleshed out.

And that's exactly what the sequels did.  The thing is, they kind of explain that Neo's powers are derived the same way Tom Cruise eventually becomes a super soldier in Edge of Tomorrow.  Cruise experiences the same events over and over again.  He begins to anticipate rather than simply react.  He's able to dodge what he knows is coming.  Although this is not the way it's presented in Neo's case, by the second film we have that wonderfully verbose Architect explain it exactly that way. 

So we end up, if we're paying attention and reading between the lines, realizing that the entire Matrix story is basically exactly like Edge of Tomorrow.

There is of course a massive difference in storytelling.  That's the art of storytelling.  That's why any of us thinks we have something new to say.  That's why every time someone complains Hollywood has nothing new to say, or that there are no new stories, it's the silliest thing ever said.  Because that's literally the story of storytelling.  It's the way it's done.

And it can't happen if you don't let it.  Get it?

The story knows best.  Writer's block exists to help you.  Get out of your own way.  You'll be amazed at what results.  And eventually, you'll have readers who do, too.  I never subscribed to the idea that stories exist for immediate results.  They are perfectly visceral things.  And instant success is nice.  Except sometimes the results aren't what you thought they'd be.  Because you left out the most important part, the story itself.  Because the story knows best.  It understands better than you that the tradition isn't the enemy.  You are.  When you get in your own way, you'll be telling yourself that, too. 

Now you know why.

IWSG January 2016: New Year's Goals

The Insecure Writers Support Group meets digitally the first day of every month.  This being the first of the new year, I figured I'd discuss goals and how I intend to approach them...

I've pushed myself for so long wanting and expecting and needing a paying future in writing that I've sometimes been hysterical about it.  I couldn't see a future where I'd be happy doing anything else.  Strangely, last year taught me a different way in the most unlikely circumstances possible.  First I thought I might never write again, and then I found a new job, one I'd never thought I was remotely qualified for: helping raise a baby. 

I won't regale you with the wonders I've already experienced in that regard here.  Instead, I'll talk about my new perspective (same as the old one), and what it means about my writing future.

I will try and not push myself so hard, and not be so hard on myself.  I will try to write, and let that be its own reward.

That's the short of it.  The long of it is a series of projects, some old and some new.  One of the old ones is Brute, a story I've talked about here in the past, previously entitled The Pond War.  It's the manuscript I was working on a year ago that I ended up abandoning for a variety of reasons, one of them being guilt (I won't be talking about the reasons for that again).  I always say that when a story has trouble being put into words, it's the story telling you that something is wrong, that if you persist with it as you're currently thinking about it, it's a mistake.  Every story eventually takes on a life of it's own.  I think most of the stories I've read that feel wrong are ones that were written without taking this into consideration.

So I had put it aside, and continued thinking about it, and eventually new thoughts came to me.  Among them is the new narrator, Miss Simon.  This old gal will be narrating a lot of my manuscripts, including About the Moxie Incident..., which concerns an amnesiac president strolling about Washington, D.C.  Miss Simon is intended to help me find a consistent comedic voice.  She made her debut in Mouldwarp Press Presents: Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War, which took care of two birds as a result (I have a jones to write about the Trojan War).  I liked the results, so the idea seems like a go.

I've been thinking about my Space Corps saga lately, thanks to my sister's feedback on the Seven Thunders manuscript I've had sitting around for a few years.  She wanted to know if the main characters were going to pop up in later books.  The more I thought about it (one of them was always going to star in one already, but the main character was only going to make a cameo at best), the more I knew what to do about that. 

So I've become more interested in getting around to writing more Space Corps books.  The only thing I want to do before I get into that (besides, probably, the Brute and About the Moxie Incident... manuscripts) is take one last stab at the Star Trek writing contests I've been entering for fifteen years (with a gap, mind you).  There's another one for this year's fiftieth anniversary of the franchise.  I've got a handful of days to write an entry.  If I win entry into the anthology, there's a publishing deal that comes with it.  I will go ahead with Seven Thunders, which has always been my baby.  If I don't, I will self-publish Seven Thunders, something I've been long reluctant to do.  But things have changed.  I kind of no longer expect big readership.  If I'm going to write this stuff, and be such a coward (and/or completely incompetent) in the submissions process, it might as well be at least available. 

It's not quite the same with my comics goals.  I lost another contest, but I'm sticking around the venue, which is kind of like what I was doing a decade ago.  If someone notices whether or not I have talent and/or potential, so be it.  But I guess I'm no longer absolutely concerned as to whether or not I have a future in comics.  I don't know whether it's because I've written so many novel manuscripts since the last time I pursued this particular goal, and not written nearly as much material in comic script form, but at the moment I'm just wondering if this one's at all reasonable at this point.  The guy who beat me (y'know, relatively speaking), has obviously made a lot more progress, with or without the win.  (His name?  Deniz Camp.  If he turns out like Drew Melbourne, at least I'll get to talk about things like Double Steak Day!)

I haven't talked about comic books nearly as much as I have prose fiction here.  That may change in the coming year, too. 

But I'm officially taking the pressure off myself.  If nothing really happens for me, so be it.  There's an adorable little girl who probably won't really care anyway. 

Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War release

Mouldwarp Press Presents #3 Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War has now been released. 

To give you a refresher course on it, this is, as the title suggests, the third volume in my Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology series, and yes, it features variations on the classic tale of the Trojan War.  Featured is my WriteClubCo colleague Christy Wiabel, who also had a story in the first volume, Project Mayhem, and a new story from me.

I'm particularly excited to present this story, because I love the Trojan War (clearly), and I've been wanting to tell a version of the Troilus & Cressida romance for years.  Plus, I recently came up with a shiny new storytelling device, the character of Miss Simon, who will probably be the narrator for a number of novels I will be writing in the future.  This was her pilot episode, so to speak, her secret origin.