Those rejections…

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

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

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

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

Anyway, we’ll see.

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, ever onward...

Kindle Vella adventures continue

 I just submitted the eleventh installment of Nine Panel Grid at Kindle Vella, which is the halfway point for the story.  Like Aronnax it isn't exactly blowing up in popularity (actually, like any of my works!), but at least with this one I would totally understand readers not at all understanding what it is that it's supposed to be accomplishing.  This one's very much something that appeals to my sensibilities.  I would have to be someone readers already care about in order to care about it, and that isn't part of this reality, so...!

The good news is I already have another Kindle Vella project lined up, and I think it will be an easier sell.  It's called Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue, and I'm going to try and be conventional with this one.  Really!  Try!  With me this is always a difficult proposition.  Once I sketch it out I will probably even be writing it simultaneously with Nine Panel, and it'll be a longer story.

As I wrote last time I checked in, I submitted Seven Thunders to an agent last weekend, and said agent somehow thought it was a great idea to get back to me on Thursday with a rejection notice.  So that was pretty cool.  Maybe they were having a really bad Thanksgiving, apparently having to work an' all, I don't know.  It may have contributed to how yesterday began playing out for me, but realistically, everyone who participates in this game struggles to get in, and since I have been playing so poorly it doesn't really surprise me to still be on the bench, but I'm determined not to give up.  I'm gonna persist.  

I did just send out Christmas presents, including this year's collection, Gracie, which I would like to believe is another opportunity to at least convince my family I'm worth rooting for, but who knows?  I had fun writing it, anyway.

Putting It Out There (Again)

This isn't much of a post except as a note that I'm putting Seven Thunders out there again.  I submitted it to a publisher last week and to an agent earlier this afternoon.  It's the effort of trying, to keep trying, that I'm pursuing this time.  I've been sitting on this manuscript for close to a decade at this point.  I've made sporadic efforts over the years in getting it published, and I guess I've got renewed determination to make something happen.  I'm actually more interested in pursuing the agent angle, something I've never really done before, even though of course the major publishers certainly prefer that.  I was reading a book about one of the major editors of the pulp magazine era who specialized in mobilizing the science fiction scene, and it got me thinking, not so much about submitting stories to the journals out there (I was never that motivated in that avenue), but the thought that I have this material that I think has potential to be something, and so many other stories just waiting to be written, and I might never actually write them unless I get this one in print.  

Well, stranger things have certainly happened.

Collider, Jupiter's Beard, the avalanche of poetry

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

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

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

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

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

Spoiling for a new project

Obviously I don't check in here terribly often.  I've been trying to figure out what my next project will be.  I completed, recently, a few screw-around projects that had been sitting around for far too long, and that was itself a nice slate-clearing.  The IWSG has a contest with the entry date coming up soon, and I wanted to write something for that, and even started writing it, and maybe will even finish writing it, who knows?  There was another contest I found out about, and thought about taking the IWSG story and using some of its elements for that, but...I didn't really want to deal with the prospect of winning that one, which was extremely unsettling to realize.  I mean, I want to be discovered.  I want to make a living writing stories.  But this contest...Aside from an obscenely generous cash prize, it expected the winner to make a lot of publicity appearances.  Talk about your insecurities...I didn't really envision myself as the kind of person they'd be interested in using for those appearances.  But what do I know?

Anyway, I've been writing comic book scripts regularly again for the past few years, short samples, which has kind of gotten me back into that groove for the first time in a decade.  Recently I found a couple artists who expressed interest in drawing up some of these scripts.  Who knows what will come of it, but I figured I'd document it.

Found out today that the agent involved in the IWSG twitter pitch thing hasn't had a chance to read any of the queries from that event, yet.  So there's always a chance, right?  Seven Thunders still has a chance!  But we'll see, right? 

My latest project may be a Seven Thunders spin-off, actually, another short story set in Space Corps, which is itself always a little thrilling, knowing I'm actually writing Space Corps material, after dreaming about it for so long...

I keep wondering how much of my struggle is because it was always going to be a struggle, and how much because of the way I've approached it.  They say persistence is always the key.  But what does persistence look like?  Obviously I've maintained this blog for five years, but apart from all the self-published material I've put out in that time (!), I haven't really made that much progress.  Persistence as in relentless?  Yeah, not so much.  I lack that kind of drive, and my relationship with the world always seems to be at least passively aggressive.  Writers ought to be in conflict with the world, to a certain extent, but it also seems as if some of them can get away with it better than others.  Recently I've been in a great deal of conflict.  I find myself wondering all over again how it is I could have reached a point where I have no meaningful connections, no one who truly understands me.

Woe is me.  Alas, poor Yorick.  We all end up as skulls, eventually.  What's to worry about?  All the minor tortures, really.  Try, try to keep perspective...

Just sent a query...

Even though I'm no doubt once again dropped from its membership rolls, I participated in the Insecure Writers Support Group's Twitter pitch session last week, and an agent gave me the go-ahead to send a query letter.

So that just happened.

I sent along a pitch for Seven Thunders.  In the query I acknowledged that it's up on Wattpad, though the first chapter I included is actually entirely new.  The chapter Wattpad denizens have read and commented on is of course the first one, and I got the idea that it needed work, so I'm glad I was spurred to rewrite it. 

Now, I can't say whether or not the facts of the above paragraph will affect the fate of the query, but I feel better for them.  Sometimes you don't realize a rewrite is necessary, and that you really are capable of writing something better, unless something makes you understand.

But, since I've recently watched Midnight in Paris again, I'm full of Hemingway bravado, and am feeling pretty good regardless of the query's outcome.  I thank the IWSG for the opportunity, and the agent for pushing it along a bit more.  Can I really ask for more?

Seven Thunders on Wattpad

I just finished serializing Seven Thunders on Wattpad.  (You can read it here.)

I made it available this way mostly because I'm still uncomfortable about self-publishing it, even though I've since done so for a Space Corps novella (Terrestrial Affairs).  Obviously I've self-published a lot of stuff.  So what's the deal?

I started serializing Seven Thunders back in January (apparently; seems like a long time ago now!), posting chapters about once a week (sometimes more, like this week), taking the time to edit them as I went.  The editing was really the big achievement here.  If you've read one of my self-published books, you'll know that.  I fixed things, and I took things out, and I added a thing here and there, and hopefully generally made the story better than when I started the process.

Seven Thunders is important to me, as the story I've dedicated the most time to, and spent the most time developing, and anticipating the most and being most significant in a backdrop (Space Corps) that I have spent even more time working on over the years.  I've written about it before and chances are I'll write about it again, if I ever decide what to do with it.

Seems in some respects by posting it on Wattpad I made my options shrink, because publishers consider Wattpad as a publishing venue, regardless of how many views you get there.  Yet I found that I had to do something with it, because Seven Thunders had become almost too precious to me.  (Again, anyone who's actually read my self-published books will scratch their heads trying to figure out how that's even possible.)  I needed to find some perspective on it. 

Writing other Space Corps stories, of varying lengths, over the years has helped.  Some of them I posted to my writing blog (Sigild V), and some of them have appeared in various anthologies (and in Terrestrial Affairs).  Just getting Space Corps itself out there is a kind of relief.  But having Seven Thunders itself, which I originally wrote in 2012-2013, be seen is entirely different.  This one's the most personal, this one I've invested everything in.  That sort of thing.

And now it's all there.  Waiting to be judged.  Or not.  I just entered it into Wattpad's "Wattys" competition, where it has a chance to be awarded one of several honors that may not may not help find readers.  At this point I have a little over 200 views across individual chapters, most of them for the first one.  Heavy readership on Wattpad is in the thousands.  I'm nowhere near close.  As far as Wattpad is concerned, Seven Thunders still barely exists. 

It's scary and exhilarating at the same time.  You always want to believe lucky breaks are possible, even though they're one-in-a-million.  What if, right?  But it's out there.  It's finally out there.  That's what it's really about...

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.

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. 

Finding the story

Letting a story percolate is perhaps one of the most important things a writer can do.  Maybe it's a lesson I've learned on my circuitous journey to what I'll today call (with apologies to Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance) authentic publication, I don't know, but I sometimes sit on stories for years, even decades.

This isn't totally unusual.  A lot of Stephen King's recent output has been work he originally envisioned or tried to tackle early in his career but for one reason or another didn't think he could execute properly at the time.  I don't know if those stories changed for him once he finally wrote them, but that's certainly been the case for me.

The story I was originally going to write about was the final novel (as the complete saga now stands in my outlines) in the Space Corps sequence.  (Mind you, I've only written one of them so far, Seven Thunders, and I happened to get my first rejection for it on my birthday, of all days, a little over a week ago.)  Based off something I'd written that wasn't even originally part of that novel, I realized something that absolutely needed to happen.  As it stands, this element will be the subject of an epilogue.  I love epilogues.  I love flipping the script on something the reader thinks they've previously known pretty well.  I don't believe in one-dimensional characters, for instance.  Someone who's seemed like the villain suddenly turns out to be sympathetic once I've presented their full story.  (Something I developed in my writing during Seven Thunders, and certainly I'm indebted to Lost for fully appreciating as a storytelling technique.)

Then I realized something about what I wanted to do with Belle York, the manuscript I'll be tackling this fall.  As it turns out, I've had to change the title, to The Cement Pond.  Suddenly this has become a much more personal story, a realization I had after a recent viewing of Saving Mr. Banks, the movie about the battle between P.L. Travers and Walt Disney over the making of Mary Poppins.  I'm still working on dotting all the t's in this new vision of the story, but I'm more excited than ever about it.

Finally, I had an epiphany concerning King of the States, a comic book project I developed a few years back, while reading the Salman Rushdie memoir Joseph Anton.  I've been trying to break into comics for years, with mostly miserable luck.  Next year I'll be in the position to spend a little money on artistic collaboration to try and get myself into a position to pitch projects to publishers like Image.  The beauty of States is that it's a long maxi-series split into short arcs, so I can sell it one arc at a time (I realize this approach bit Jack Kirby in the butt when he tackled New Gods) if necessary.  I changed the main character's name, figured out what he ought to be doing, what he did, and what it means for everyone around him.  Suddenly the whole thing seems as vital as I only thought it was originally.

All three are instances of coming up with better versions of stories I thought I already knew, all because I didn't jump on writing them as soon as I came up with the ideas.  I tend to write on spur-of-inspiration, changing the story even as I'm writing it, so this isn't entirely new to me, but having a better idea of what it should be before I begin, I think, is about as good a way to approach a project as there can be.  To have done this with three projects more or less at the same time has certainly made for an interesting couple of weeks.  I'm the kind of writer who thinks most of the art of writing is actually the art of thinking about the story.  The advice of writing every day can help with fundamentals of the form, but I don't know that it necessarily improves the storytelling, unless you're capable of doing both at the same time.  Storytelling, for me, is everything.  You can be an excellent writer, but if your grasp of what you're trying to tell is poor, then you're still, ultimately, failing as a writer.  Some of the worst writing I've read is clearly the result of the writer going full-steam ahead with an idea that was never fleshed out.  They insist on following through with whatever they came up with first when it should have become clear at some point that the story was in fact headed in a different direction.  It's like a writer who thinks description is everything, but they fill a room with nothing but empty space.

Ever realized that about something you were working on?

How a very short story came about...

Back in May I decided to take another shot at DL Hammons's WRiTE CLUB.  Turns out my entry wasn't selected to compete.  Fine.  That wasn't ultimately all that important to the 500 word story I wrote for it.

(Read it here.)

"Slightly Fitted" began as a challenge for me to overcome something I'd told Nigel Mitchell in my reaction to one of his 100 word stories.  Every writer has pet peeves.  One of mine is the word "scream."  Except on rare occasions, it's just not a description I care to read much less write.  After leaving a comment to that regard, I guess I started rethinking that.  So I decided to write a scenario where a character heard a scream.

While I was thinking about it, I remembered another piece of micro fiction I'd written over at Sigild, "Facts in the Disappearance of Elmer Haskell."  If you take the time to read it, you'll see how incredibly minimalist it is (and very, very short).  It was just an idea I had that I never really explored, or particularly wanted to.  Except finally I kind of wanted to.  I started thinking about it.  Elmer turned out to have a sister who went searching for him.  I was no longer interested in Elmer himself, or exploring why he disappeared, but the rest of the context.

And it seemed like a great time to once again revisit the Space Corps sandbox.

As my long-suffering readers will probably know, Space Corps is my sci-fi saga.  I'm pinned my whole literary future on the absurd belief that I will get a major publisher interested in it.  Fame and fortune, movies, all of that.  I've developed Space Corps for decades.  I made a focal point of Seven Thunders, and wrote the first full-length Space Corps manuscript a few years ago.  I sent Seven Thunders to a major publisher.  In a little over a month, I will probably get to stop waiting for a response.  It's just more slush pile material to them.  For me, it's everything.  Yeah, I've self-published a good bit of material at this point.  I understand that it's ridiculously common at this point for writers to expect self-published or small press books to be legitimate conclusions to their literary journeys.  But I want more.  Especially for Space Corps.  It's a dream.

"Slightly Fitted" is part of a curious development for Space Corps.  Most of what Space Corps will be was developed years ago.  Refined, sure, over the years, and continually so, but the books in the series I hope one day exist and can be found in any good bookstore (or digital platform) looked like they were all outlined, the story complete.  Until I realized it wasn't.  I had never actually developed the story of how humanity entered the intergalactic community.

As a Star Trek geek, First Contact was a crucial moment.  I adored Enterprise.  I love seeing how things begin.  In more recent times I've been writing snippets of stories like "Slightly Fitted" that have helped shape this beginning to the Space Corps saga.  I snuck one such into The Kennedy Curse, an anthology that for me represents a kind of official literary debut.

Now, Space Corps has primarily become the story of humanity's relationship with the Danab.  I could tell you a lot about the Danab, but suffice to say that they're big nasty aliens and there were two major wars fought between Earth and them.  Seven Thunders pivots around the second.  All these snippets have been shaping the first.

The other thing "Slightly Fitted" explored was the idea of immigrant life.  Writer G. Willow Wilson fascinates me for any number of reasons, but one of them is because she's a woman who converted to Islam.  So there's a little of that in this particular story, too, and the reason why the main character is a little girl.  I could write a lot more about this situation, how it more directly ties in with "Disappearance of Elmer Haskell," for one (which also transforms whatever I used to think I knew about that one).  The book outline I've crafted for the new final Space Corps story doesn't necessarily feature any of these elements, but who knows?

What most interested me about "Slightly Fitted," though, was naming a Danab city.  I loved what I came up with: Gugu Kendi.  "Gugu" as in actress Gugu (goo goo) Mbatha-Raw, who recently starred in Belle but who was also completely adorable in Larry Crowne ("Tis gratis!") and was featured in the short-lived Undercovers.  Since the last book will be saturated in all things Danab, this was a fine way to really start getting a feel for them.

(A city name that includes a word like "goo goo" for big nasty aliens?  To me, intriguing.)

For me, Space Corps is indistinguishable from sci-fi worlds that exist in movies and television, the ones I love (Star Trek, Star Wars).  It's not really something I think about in relation to sci-fi worlds as they exist in other books.  I haven't really read a lot of sci-fi books in that regard.  Seems kind of stupid.  I'm pretty sure I haven't written Seven Thunders in a fashion that's similar to other conceptually similar books (military and/or space opera).  Par for the course with the way I write.  I think I managed to make it more accessible than, say Pale Moonlight.  But what do I know?

Hey, I'm an idiot for my own material.  We all are.  It's so personal to me, though, that I don't think I could self-publish it, the way I've been going.  I don't want it to languish.  I think it sells itself.  Can't get into WRiTE CLUB, but hey (I thought most of the writers from this year were terrible anyway).  Crazy stupid dream.

But they all are.

Seven Facts About Seven Thunders

Seeing as today is 7-7-14, and that's not going to happen again in my lifetime (probably), I figured I'd take a moment to talk about Seven Thunders again.  Don't worry; by the time you're done reading this one, if you so choose, you'll know what it is if you've forgotten or hadn't heard me talking about it before.

1. I originally came up with the idea for the book in 1998.
2. The title is an allusion to the Book of Revelation in the Bible; I replaced the original one with it thanks to fond memories of DC's 1996 ad campaign for Kingdom Come, which drew from the famous biblical apocalypse for inspiration.  There are no real allusions to Revelation other than that, however.  There are seven major characters.  Two of them are brothers, and they are the main characters whose arcs drive the story.
3. It's not the first story I started working on in the Space Corps saga, but it's always been the most important one.  There are eight additional books currently planned in the saga.  The next book is a prequel and the third is a sequel.  Since these are the earliest stories I began work on, dating back to 1995, I've since found them malleable to reshaping in light of what Seven Thunders became, a process I'm still working on.  The prequel, for instance, now features a conflict of brothers at its heart as well, while the sequel will likely feature one of Seven Thunders' brothers more prominently than it originally did.
4. It is based on the War of 1812.
5. I finally started writing it in the fall of 2012, which counting 1998 meant it took fourteen years to percolate.
6. It features three acts, as many of my manuscripts do, although in this case it's because I originally conceived it as a trilogy of books.  Space saga, three acts.  Seemed appropriate.
7. There is a British war film from 1957 (alternate title: The Beasts of Marseilles) with the same name.

   

   via Movie Mail

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.

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!

IWSG November 2013

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I was going to write this month's edition about the woes of finding readership for indy literary fiction in the States, but instead chose something more immediate, which would be that most regular of writing challenges, NaNoWriMo.

I participated in NaNo in 2004-2006, successfully completing it each year (and subsequently ended up with my first novel, The Cloak of Shrouded Men).  Since that time I've written novel-length manuscripts around this period, one a year, from 2009 to the present.  I say "to the present" because I have a new WIP, In the Land of Pangaea, and owing to how my year has developed, I waited until this month to begin writing it.

And I had a good mind to bang out at least the required 50,000 words for November.

I've done that several times with the previous manuscripts.  I know, I know, I know I can do it.  And that I can complete whole 100,000+ word stories.

And yet I'm still apprehensive about the whole deal.

My week is kind of screwy.  I've determined that the best days to write are actually the days I work, because I want to leave weekends to other purposes.  The ability to modify the number of words I write in a given day is not a problem.  Thanks to NaNo I learned long ago what I was capable of, and have played around with that to such a degree that it's just not a concern.

And yet, technically I am already behind, and that still leaves me in a kind of panic.

For instance, I've just used the last two days to further develop the outline rather than write the actual story.  This is a good thing (and keeping with the spirit of NaNo, which dictates you leave the whole process inside the month), and harks back to the extensive outlines I did for my Space Corps stories for years (although not, surprisingly the one Space Corps manuscript I've actually written, last year's WIP Seven Thunders).  At the time I was doing those, I wasn't necessarily thinking of them as novels, but I've since realized that I did myself a huge favor in that regard.  And this is the first time I've knowingly done the same for another manuscript.

That much is good.  That much is great!  In fact, I borrowed plenty from the Space Corps outline experience, including my favorite way to tell a story.  I've done the aha! character moments in other manuscripts, but this will be the first time I see it coming.  This will be the first time I haven't left myself with a lot of potential surprises.  I see this as a good thing, because there was plenty of that in the outlining process itself, and all the time I spent developing the literary landscape of Pangaea.

But still.  But still!

I no longer feel the need to prove to myself in any way that I can accomplish the NaNo goal, but it's still there, sentimentally.  If I don't do it this year, I'll feel bad.  Sure, I might get over it, but it just feels right to keep the tradition alive.

So that's what's making me feel insecure this month.

...stupid, stupid NaNo...

The Kennedy Curse in my hands!

Today I received in the mail my complimentary contributor's copy of The Kennedy Curse, which features my short story, "The Cuban Exile Crisis."

Needless to say, excited!

The most exciting thing for me, as I've said a few times before, is that this marks the first time someone other than myself has published a story from my Space Corps saga.  Space Corps is my sci-fi magnum opus, spanning an entire series of books, starting with a manuscript I completed earlier this year, Seven Thunders, which I will be shopping around starting as soon as I can muster the courage to do so.

The thing about "Cuban Exile Crisis" in particular is that it continues a curious impulse of mine recently to begin fleshing out a part of the saga that I'd previously left more or less alone, being the first human-Danab conflict.  On my Space Corps page over at my writing blog, there are two others already, "Use Both Hands" and "Seventy-One and Counting" (it's also worth noting that both "Who Killed Iron Joe?" and "George Jackman and the Monastery at Burnside" both provide prelude material to Seven Thunders, the latter of which helping to inform elements of the story that I hadn't considered before).  Heroes and incidents from the First Danab War keep popping up in these tales.

I figured in an anthology dedicated to the legacy of the Kennedys there was bound to be room for a future descendant who could find room to contribute.

You can purchase The Kennedy Curse here.

(Formerly) Secret Origins of Yoshimi

All month long I'm participating in the A-to-Z Challenge over at Scouring Monk, talking about both the Space Corps saga and the Yoshimi Trilogy.

Today, as the title suggests, I'm going to drop some background knowledge on you.  I've previously done that here with Seven Thunders, where I explained how the neglected War of 1812 helped inform the structure of the story.  I like to do that in my fiction.  When I was writing The Cloak of Shrouded Men, specifically the individual installments Colinaude, the Angry Avenger (2004), Repose of the Eidolon (2005) and Cotton's War (2006) during NaNoWriMo, I would conclude each month by explaining the latest influences.  It was a fine way to finish writing a long work.  The entire back section of the Cloaked book is filled with a version of what I wrote in that regard.

Well, the story of warrior orphan Yoshimi was not something that came naturally to me.  I don't do action very well.  I write about the effects of a situation more than the situation itself, or in other words from a very cerebral vantage point.  In fact, the start of this secret origin perhaps shouldn't be so secret.  It's very much the story of another effect, the Flaming Lips album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.  It was my introduction to concept albums, my generation's very own.  If you've never heard it, I feel bad for you.  Anyway, that's the most superficial of secret origins to explore.

Another informs an entire element of the story.  Remember how I said I'm not much of an action writer?  Since Yoshimi by definition had to experience a lot of action, I had to come up with a more cerebral approach, and I stumbled into that approach because at the time I was developing the story I was working in a bookstore.  It was Hiroshi Moriya's The 36 Secret Strategies of the Martial Arts, a kind of Art of War for those of us looking to be more clever about it.  Each of the strategies are employed and quoted during the course of the story, and the specific number of them affected the story, too, including the number of foster homes Yoshimi endures early in her life and the key battles that must occur in order for the story to conclude (sort of like a video game!).  Additionally, I honored Moriya himself as a character; the book as a present Yoshimi receives; and the translator of the edition I purchased, William Scott Wilson, who ended up inspiring a character more important than Moriya's (although in the story one succeeds the other once again).

The final element is the final acknowledgement that, again, I am not a writer of action.  It was the movie Warrior, released in the fall of 2011, when I began writing the story.  Warrior is a movie about MMA (mixed martial arts) fighting, but it's not really about the fighting.  It stars Tom Hardy, who wins a lot of his fights without really having to try.  That was the pattern by which I had Yoshimi fight.  It was a clever way to avoid having to write a lot of intricate fight scenes.  Warrior, by the way, quickly became one of my favorite movies.  It's awesome in every way possible.  It also ended up affecting how I concluded Seven Thunders.  So, a very influential movie in my writing!

But again, if you're curious about the Yoshimi Trilogy, you should also be reading Scouring Monk this month.

The Fifteen Year Journey to Completing Seven Thunders

As readers, we don't seldom believe we'll ever get to know the authors of the books we love.  In the social media age there's a slightly better chance of that happening, but then there's also a good chance you'll know more about what they do than who they are.

Allow me to change some of that for you now: I walk everywhere and the most imaginative thing I do in my life has nothing to do with my writing, but rather how I interact with my sister's cat, which is an extension of how my whole family interacted with our dog.

Before I go much further, let me just direct you to my second-ever interview, for the upcoming Temporal Element anthology, where you may find out even more things about me you never thought you'd care about.  Here can read it here.

Anyway, I just finished writing Seven Thunders.  I started writing it in October last year, but really the process began in 1998, and really it started in 1995, and I can only go that far back because the past gets a little hazy.  All I can say with any certainty was that I was fourteen when there's evidence I could show you to support the origins of this book.

I was a teenage Star Trek fan.  I was a fan of Star Trek when I was younger, too, and my memories of Star Wars seem to go back as far as I can remember, because my family obsessively watched those films for years and years, but I begin by saying that I was a teenage Star Trek fan because Star Trek was always on TV.  I watched syndicated reruns of the original series, made my way through The Next Generation, and continued right through Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, the last of which was on TV as I was preparing to figure out what it meant for me to be an adult.

When I was fourteen I began formalizing my interest in Star Trek by lovingly creating a pastiche.  In these stories I created my own version by following three captains rather than a single one, though they collapsed into one and that's the only one I still remember much less use.  I created a new generation, too, and then other platforms other than starship adventures.  In 1998, for some reason, I decided to tell a more singular story, one that didn't fit the format of episodic adventures, serialized or otherwise.  It was originally called Paradise Lost, even though I knew someone else had used that title.

The first mark of inspiration I can come up with is an advertising campaign for the DC mini-series Kingdom Come, which used language from the Book of Revelation in the Bible, specifically referring to the notable superheroes involved as the metaphorical seven thunders of John's vision.  And that's why the title eventually became Seven Thunders.

The name of the lead character seemed to spring pretty organically, borrowed from someone I knew from school and a baseball player (Nolan Ryan).  The rest of them took a little more developing.  The female lead eventually found her name in the book The Unredeemed Captive, which I read in college for a history class.  Another lead (there are, naturally, seven of them) took his surname from a favorite teacher in high school, and the curious thing was that this character already existed in another series of stories from what would eventually become known as the Space Corps, and I knew from the start that this wouldn't make him the main character of Seven Thunders but rather his best friend.

I started to think I knew these characters pretty well.  I remember watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and thinking that a lot of what I thought I knew about Seven Thunders simply wasn't enough.  It was around this time that I started writing actual stories based on the Space Corps universe.  Most of what I'd done and would continue to do was simply making notes, learning everything, plotting the stories rather than writing them.  I learned that the first story I ever wrote was not ultimately a story that I needed to write.  I already had that story.  It was Seven Thunders.  Even as I plotted many more stories, the one I had to write was Seven Thunders.  And so the years progressed and I plotted more stories, but never wrote any of them.  I never finished that first story.  Part of the reason why was because I was intimidated.  I planned something long, and I'd never written a long story before, and it was already taking longer than I'd thought before I realized how long it was taking, and then a chapter was eaten by a computer crash, and I stopped trying to write it entirely.

And I kept plotting stories.  The more I plotted the more I learned, and the more I learned the more I knew what was truly important, and what the shape of the whole thing was, and what needed to change and what already existed that could take new significance.  Basically learning that all the plotting was a good thing, and that all the time not writing Seven Thunders was a good thing.  For some reason I realized that Seven Thunders had to take the basic shape of the War of 1812, because it came to fascinate me, because it didn't seem to fascinate anyone else, and things like that can be used for inspiration perhaps more than things people know, because they can be surprised.  You can find all kinds of insight possible.  Of course, you can do the same with the things people know, or think they know.

Anyway, I kept learning new things about Seven Thunders, and I started writing books.  I don't mean to say that like it's any kind of accomplishment, because if anything I've learned that it really isn't, because all those people who say that it is really don't know what they're talking about.  Lots of people write books.  Lots of people don't publish lots of books because they get lots of books that lots of people write.  I learned a great deal about what it means for me to write a book, what kind of book I write, while writing these earlier books.  I learned my voice, and that was important.

Still, when I finally sat down to write Seven Thunders, I was still surprised.  Part of the reason I was surprised was because I'd never taken the time to write an extensive outline for it like I had with all the other Space Corps stories.  So that meant that most of what I was going to write would develop as I was writing, and this took even more development than I expected.  I started writing last October, thinking as it normally turns out that I would write the book in the three remaining months of the year. Except it didn't work out that way.

By January I wasn't done, and by February I hadn't written a word since December, and by March I had to force myself into just writing again, and this was good, because by then I had experienced and done what was necessary to finish the book.  I wrote a few more stories, and those became incorporated into Seven Thunders, and so all of this is to say that if I had written Seven Thunders at any other point in my life, in any other way, it wouldn't be what it is today, and I'm a writer who unfortunately believes that what happens is what was supposed to happen, even when it's frustrating experiencing what happens.  I'm happy with the shape the book ultimately took.

Sometimes I think it would take another book entirely to say everything there is to say about how Seven Thunders was written, the false starts and everything I assumed along the way.  To have finally written it and be done with it is something I always assumed would happen at some point, but I never knew what that point was, just somewhere on the horizon when things were anything but what they were and what they were becoming and what they became.  Well, now I know what they are, and I can relax a little, because I've completed a journey, closed a loop, and for me, a lot of life is about doing that.  Sometimes you know exactly where you're headed, and that still doesn't make it anymore clear.  So imagine when you don't know the destination...