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.

The end of the Star Wars Variations

I just wrote the last installment of the 101 Star Wars Variations.

To get the whole thing finished this year, because I'd gotten too far behind in the pace I should have been maintaining all year (in the early months I wrote about a third of what I should have and then half, and then only by May had I figured that out).  By the end of September, I'd determined to ramp up the process, writing one a day until I was finished in time for November, when I hoped to began my next novel, The Pond War (the name it's taken since the last time I mentioned it; also known as The Cement Pond and Belle York previously).

In a way, that forced me to do something I rarely do, which is follow the old writers adage of actually, you know, writing every day.  It was good practice, or so I figured, at the very least, preparing to write another whole book, something I'd previously learned how to do, of course, during NaNoWriMo, which I tackled for the first time ten years ago.

By the end of the Variations, I'd realized something important.  More important than this whole crazy idea (inspired by a comic book based on George Lucas's original draft, The Star Wars, which features familiar names and situations, but most of it severely jumbled up) being a giant compensation for the fact that I'd loved Star Wars my whole life but had never really written stories about it the way I had with Star Trek over the years.  (I'm more than caught up now, thanks!)  This was about realizing what Star Wars truly was for me, how and why I felt the way I did about it.

You see, I'm one of the fans who actually like the prequels.  I think I've realized why.  I never saw the originals any other way than as a trilogy.  By the time Return of the Jedi was released in theaters, I was all of two years old, far too young to have experienced it the way the first generation of fans had, after being part of the 1977 phenomenon that was the theatrical debut of Star Wars, when it didn't have Episode IV or A New Hope attached to its title, much less the 1980 revelation that was The Empire Strikes Back (in which Darth Vader delivered his shocking news to Luke Skywalker some four months before I was born).

I can appreciate how those first fans experienced the original trilogy.  As part of the second generation, the one that actually yearned for more movies and thought they would probably never happen even though the wait was really only sixteen years (chronologically younger than Luke was when the saga began), the originals stood in approximately the same vacuum, except for one key difference: for me the whole story, such as it was at the time, unfolded at the same time.  I never had a chance to consider any one film on its own but rather all three together, inseparable.  It was all one long arc.

For the first generation, I imagine that most of the fun with the first one was that it was exactly what it seems to be, a terrific science fiction experience, something that had never before been accomplished with such precision and skill, bombast, bravado, mystique...Basically everything you could want in a movie.  It was the birth of a whole new era.  Adventures began to dominate films more than ever before, with new purpose, with something to live up to, something to try and improve on (they're still trying, by the way).

For these fans, although they thrilled to the wild invention, it was the experience as a whole they savored.  They admired the individual components, the things that led to more movies, and it was far easier to differentiate, to prefer, to begin having those pesky...expectations.

Those fans are probably the bulk of the audience that ended up hating the prequels so much.  For second generation fans like me, and as you've no doubt heard repeatedly third generation ones, younger viewers, the prequels were easier to stomach.  The thing is, the prequels make perfect sense for the succeeding generations.  They expand on the story, especially because they're prequels, going backward to show how things began, to visualize things we already knew, the biggest one of them all, in fact: how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.

For the later fans, it's easier to look at the full scope of it as a family saga.  We never really dwelt on the pesky inconsistencies of Luke and Leia's relationship, because we already knew what they were, that Leia would end up with Han despite their exceedingly contentious relationship, that Luke's journey was really about the redemption of his father rather than the traditional heroic quest meaning, essentially, that Star Wars wasn't really about the Rebellion against the Empire at all, even though that's what destroying a couple of Death Stars along the way represented.

Writing a series of stories exploring these elements, twisting them and turning them and pushing them to their logical limits, I realized more and more that Star Wars wasn't about the adventure at all, but its characters and how they relate to each other, their importance to each other, whether their last name was Skywalker or not.  I had to write exactly what I knew rather than create some other set of characters and some other random adventures, which is what most writers invariably do with Star Wars fiction and what I once read and then became incredibly weary with, because all of that entirely missed the point.  Star Wars is not random at all.  Treat it that way and you lose all perspective.

That first generation of fans, and who knows maybe even traitors from my own and whoever felt like sympathizing along the way, forgot all that.  They only remembered what they wanted to remember about Star Wars.  The romance, if you will, which ironically is also why they hated so many direct romantic gestures in the prequels, a galaxy that was on the verge of collapse.  They became nitpickers.  Nitpicking only exist when you've already made up your mind to hate something.  You will hear from most of those fans that they prefer, in the end, the dirty reality of the originals.  Do anything else with Star Wars and it ends up seeming like just another period drama.  Star Wars fans don't do period dramas.  That's the whole point, right?  They groove on Yoda admonishing Like about the Force, or Han being sarcastic about it, but they don't actually want to see Jedi running around all over the place, don't want to know the real rather than metaphorical source of their powers.  Anything more complicates things.  They had all the complications they wanted in the originals, thank you.  Been there done that.

Immersing myself in something like that, anyway, got me to write a lot of short works, and maybe even got me to think more about what I write.  They call this stuff fan fiction, but I don't like thinking in such terms.  The characters may be familiar, and even the situations, but it's still me doing all the thinking, figuring out where it's all headed.  It takes different shapes, one more than a hundred of them, actually.  That's what writers do all the time.  They reinterpret the world around them, try to make sense out of it, even when it seems other people have done it and done it better before them.  It's a challenge.

Writers ought to like challenges.

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?