One of the other things that's sidetracked work on new material has been Warder, which you might otherwise know as The Cloak of Shrouded Men.
Cloak was the first book I self-published, the product of three successive, and successful, NaNo experiences ('04-'06), the first physical copies of which I received in the mail the same day the last Harry Potter book was released in 2007 (a coincidence that has always amused me). I began noticing further grammatical revision needs immediately. I was supposed to have a new edition through an upstart publisher fairly soon after, but that fell apart, and the idea of releasing one never really left me.
Part of the problem was the title, not to mention the name of the main character, a superhero called Eidolon. I loved both, and never considered changing the latter (pronounced "idol-on," as I later clarified; based on a line in a Hart Crane poem), but have had numerous ideas for the former. Recently I settled on Warder.
I've tried shopping the book around to publishers for years. I unlisted it from the original self-publisher a few years back. I've done revisions, will probably do more, but I've really liked some of the ideas that've occurred to me, including a radical new ending that redefines an important element (or two). Finding a cover image has been another long-term quest over the years, if I wanted to self-publish again, but just a few hours earlier, I think I finally solved that, too.
I intend, if I pull the trigger, to publish Warder in three volumes. This is a story I never really intended to write in the first place, but I've never been able to leave it behind. I like what I did with it (even if I know some readers, like Pat, will think there's too much philosophizing, too little action), and yeah, I even think, foolishly, if anything were to finally get me into comics, this story finally landing properly could do it. Probably. Maybe.
Well, we'll see. (Heh.)
Showing posts with label The Cloak of Shrouded Men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Cloak of Shrouded Men. Show all posts
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Juggling projects
I know I just wrote about goals for the year, but here's another look at projects:
- The Write Off - This is from the Millarworld forums. I've been participating in these for a couple years now, ever since I first visited the forums for the Millarworld Annual contests. I graduated to hosting the Write Offs several rounds ago, and while participation has certainly slowed from its peak, I'm still proud of keeping them going. Technically there're two rounds open at the moment, one involving Mark Millar's DC/Marvel work and another based off of The Last Jedi. I tend to participate as well as host. Last week I wrote a draft of a script for the Star Wars one, and hopefully will finish one for the other this week.
- Cloak of Shrouded Men - This was my first book, which I self-published through iUniverse, before free self-publishing became a much more convenient thing. I delisted it from them a while back in the interest of finally getting a revised edit available through CreateSpace. I just got a copy of Tom King's A Once Crowded Sky, which gave me another idea of what I could do with it. Maybe I'll make this a priority.
- In Greater Fear - This is a new book idea that came to me last week. Could be very, very interesting.
- Dirty Animals - This is the comic book project I was talking about last time. No real updates to report, but it still fascinates me that I'm finally taking an active role in trying to break into the medium. In hindsight really should've done something like this sooner.
- poetry - I put out a collection way back in 2012, when I launched this blog, but never got around to putting out further ones, even though the material was prepared years ago. And I have more material since then that can be prepped, too. Last week I bought some poetry at a thrift store, and that got me thinking about poems again. It's not so much the writing but the collections I've really let slip, as I haven't thought of myself as a poet (even while writing quite a bit of it) since college. Weird.
- Sapo Saga sequel - Still have this on the docket, but it seems to have been bumped by any number of the above projects. Would be great to have a publishing contract!
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
IWSG November 2014: My Insane NaNoWriMo Approach This Year!
For this month's Insecure Writers Support Group post, like more than a few others I'm actually going to discuss NaNoWriMo a little.
National Novel Writing Month is the insane time of the year when you get to learn exactly what kind of writer you really are by powering through 50,000 words in a thirty-day span. This was something I officially tackled in 2004-2006, which led to The Cloak of Shrouded Men, my first book , and unofficially been completing while writing various other books starting in 2009, including last year when I started on In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote about here at the time and apparently that helped inspire Michael Abayomi this year, which is pretty cool.
This year I'm being totally insane. Back in 2011 I managed to write chapters of The Whole Bloody Affair (also known as the Yoshimi Trilogy) in 10,000-word increments. The idea, if it is at all possible in reality, is to try and nearly double that, with 18,000 words with each chapter as I tackle The Pond War, my War of 1812 tale that's a mash-up with the Tim Laflamme character originally introduced in Land of Pangaea. It's my bid at Alice in Wonderland and every other story like it (Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, etc. etc. etc.), except the fantasy will actually be in the real world and brutal reality through the door to the other side.
Why am I writing, or attempting to write so many words each day? Because I figured out I could when I needed to write a lot of words last year. Whole Bloody Affair was training ground. The more experience I have writing, the more I'm aware of what I'm comfortable writing, and Pond War is something I've been developing, or in other words thinking about, for much of this year. I'm feeling confident. Ridiculously overconfident?
We'll see!
National Novel Writing Month is the insane time of the year when you get to learn exactly what kind of writer you really are by powering through 50,000 words in a thirty-day span. This was something I officially tackled in 2004-2006, which led to The Cloak of Shrouded Men, my first book , and unofficially been completing while writing various other books starting in 2009, including last year when I started on In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote about here at the time and apparently that helped inspire Michael Abayomi this year, which is pretty cool.
This year I'm being totally insane. Back in 2011 I managed to write chapters of The Whole Bloody Affair (also known as the Yoshimi Trilogy) in 10,000-word increments. The idea, if it is at all possible in reality, is to try and nearly double that, with 18,000 words with each chapter as I tackle The Pond War, my War of 1812 tale that's a mash-up with the Tim Laflamme character originally introduced in Land of Pangaea. It's my bid at Alice in Wonderland and every other story like it (Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, etc. etc. etc.), except the fantasy will actually be in the real world and brutal reality through the door to the other side.
Why am I writing, or attempting to write so many words each day? Because I figured out I could when I needed to write a lot of words last year. Whole Bloody Affair was training ground. The more experience I have writing, the more I'm aware of what I'm comfortable writing, and Pond War is something I've been developing, or in other words thinking about, for much of this year. I'm feeling confident. Ridiculously overconfident?
We'll see!
Monday, March 31, 2014
The Part About Endings
I just read a good ending, in Jerome Charyn's The Seventh Babe, and so it got me thinking about the subject. As a writer, this is a particularly compelling subject. It's about as important as the name of the story, the names of the characters.
The way I ended The Cloak of Shrouded Men, for instance, was crucial to the whole story. When I originally wrote this one, it was during the course of three successive NaNoWriMos, so it's perhaps more accurate to say that I wrote three endings. The first, after "Colinaude, the Angry Avenger," came about because I realized the main character was headed in a dark direction. He kills a man. Considering the main character is a superhero, this is a fairly significant event for him. The second, after "Repose of the Eidolon," was less of an ending because by that point I knew I was going to be writing the character again. That ending was more of a beginning, as the character dons his superhero costume again for the first time since the end of "Angry Avenger." The whole of the third, "Cotton's War," is one long ending. Actually, it takes place after the ending, the climactic fight the character must experience in order to complete his experiences in the story. The fight apparently leaves him at death's door, only for an eleventh hour reveal that he's switched places with someone else, and that he's been comfortably observing the results of his response to killing a man from 'Angry Avenger." His morality has flipped. He has decided that the only way to respond to a world that no longer makes sense to him is to reshape the landscape. It is a little like my version of Watchmen in that sense, except there's no belief that he has won a war so much as completed, well, a story.
That was my first attempt at concluding a novel. The next one, Pale Moonlight, was a little trickier. The whole story became a study about ideas. Everything about it is less a traditional story and more a confrontation with 20th century psychology in the wake of some of the greatest horrors history has ever seen. It's what happens when the climactic battle becomes more about one side walking away. Who does that? So the character who is supposed to walk away dies instead. Of the three protagonists who confront the villain, one of them symbolizes the effort to understand evil, another the effort to reject, and the third the effort to confront it directly, which is to say contradict it. This is what a lot of people have been trying to argue recently, that instead of picking a fight you pacify the enemy. Except I'm ambivalent as to how easy that really is. So if I'm to write a story about it, I write about what I imagine has to happen in order for it to work. It's such a convoluted story, I'm sure I won't have any readers for it basically ever. I guess that's why it had absolutely no traction with publishers.
So I went in a different direction with the next novel, which I'm seriously considering self-publishing this year. I've previously referred to it as Minor Contracts and its original title, Ecce Homo, but it's now going by Holy Men. This is the first time I've written a long-form story without having some kind of climactic fight at the end. Like Pale Moonlight, it's a story of ideas, a much more direct grappling with my religious beliefs. I knew exactly how this one would end from the moment I started writing it, which was why I named it Ecce Homo originally, Latin for "Behold the man!," which is what Pontius Pilate utters to the crowd after having Jesus scourged. Except the man in my story isn't Jesus, but Adam, who is pleading with God to give his son Cain a second chance. Really??? It's a story that needs to be read to be understood, and this is something I knew from the moment I started writing it, so it's actually one of my clearer narratives. Swear to god!
From there, I wrote The Whole Bloody Affair, which was my version of a young adult novel, following the adventures of warrior orphan Yoshimi. Since the whole premise of this one involved fighting, I knew the climax definitely involved a fight. And so I peppered the book with a lot of short fights. It was originally my idea to have the climax feature another one, because I don't choreograph very well. I have to think a lot about it. It's the whole reason the superhero in Cloak of Shrouded Men does very little actual fighting. So I end up thinking of such moments more as set pieces, the way movies center a lot of their stories around specific moments, usually action scenes.
That's what happens in Seven Thunders, which is the first book I think other people might actually want to read. I've been foolish enough recently to send it to a publisher. It's the linchpin to my whole Space Corps saga. Whatever else I write, this is still what I think will be my legacy. It took me fifteen years and three prior manuscripts to even attempt writing Seven Thunders. And it was the same movie that ended up informing the fighting in Whole Bloody Affair that ultimately gave me the shape of it, including the ending. I'm talking about Warrior, the best MMA movie that will ever be made. It's the story of two brothers and their father, all of them estranged, all of whom converge back into each other's lives thanks to a tournament. The brothers end up meeting in the finals. It's seriously one of the best movies I've ever seen. Seven Thunders is also a story about brothers. I knew that whatever else I did in the story, I needed the ending to ring as true emotionally for me as Warrior's did. I'd dreamed about this ending for so long. Previously it played out a little like the lightsaber duels of the Star Wars prequels.
Endings aren't always my strong suit. Half the reason I spent a few years doing micro fiction was so that I had to tackle endings on a regular basis, the beginning so close to the ending that there could be no mistake as to how one met the other. As a reader, I've developed an instinct for how a story's shape looks. I happen to be partial to stories that end well, not just begin well. I hear all this stuff about how a story has to begin well, but that's perhaps the least important part of a story. I've read plenty of bad beginnings that quickly turn into excellent middles. But how many excellent endings?
Sometimes, when I want to end a story without having really finished writing it, I simply conclude with the overall effect the events of the story have ended up having. That's what I did with "Lost Convoy" from the Monorama collection. Last summer my laptop died on me. It ate the ending of Seven Thunders. Not the ending, but the coda. With that one, it was as important to do a proper ending as explain what happened after it. I guess bringing the lessons of Cloak of Shrouded Men and later efforts full circle. Luckily my sister helped the computer regurgitate the coda.
With the manuscript I've recently completed, In the Land of Pangaea, there are three separate stories that are nonetheless interrelated, and so once more I needed a coda to bring it all together satisfactorily. I've also been working on Zooropa all year, which is another way I've been meditating on endings recently. Zooropa is the title I've given a series of stories I've been working on for about as long as Space Corps. It encompasses "Leopold's Concentration" and several other stories from Monorama, and several that aren't in it. When I tackled "Eponymous Monk," a serialized quasi-cartoon strip I recently completed over at Scouring Monk, I knew I still wasn't completing that story. So when it came to thinking up a theme for this year's A-to-Z Challenge, I determined that it only made sense to use the Zooropa world, which was all I needed to finally reach the conclusion, which will come in the form of "Shooks Run," from an outline I actually completed last year, without realizing where the story would be by this point. (If you're interested in my A-to-Z, it'll be at the Monk, as always.)
So I will soon have the shape of that whole story completed, including its ending, which may seem to be a little out of left field, the way Cloak of Shrouded Men and Pale Moonlight end. I'm not regressing, though. I wonder if I will rewrite the whole Zooropa saga one day. But for now, it's enough to know I finally have its ending, because that's something that has eluded me for close to two decades. Which is incredibly frustrating for a writer who has made endings so important to his stories. But all the sweeter for finally having reached it.
The 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.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
IWSG March 2014
It's time to support your local Insecure Writers Support Group, once again without the benefit of James Garner or Harry Morgan. (We writers live dangerous lives. That's why we're so insecure.)
This post is not really about my recent release, Pale Moonlight, but it was directly inspired by the book's first review. It was a terrible review. Made me wonder all over again if I'm crazy.
Except I started thinking, remembering why I write the way I write, and maybe it's not so crazy after all. There is, after all, a method to the madness. And if there's a method, maybe it's not madness after all...
The thing about Pale Moonlight is that it's a vampire story that's not really like any other vampire story you've read. I like to say that if you're not writing like you, you're not really writing at all. You're just filling a page with words. My style, my intent, is necessarily uniquely my own, but it isn't without precedent, or perhaps what they call inspiration.
I call my style, when I call it anything, deep map fiction. I borrow the term "deep map" from William Least Heat-Moon, one of the better-known travel writers, responsible for Blue Highways and various other books. The one I take the phrase from is PrairyErth, in which he explores an entire Kansas county on foot, or in other words taking a "deep map" of the territory. What he does is learn as much as possible about something, and then reports his findings.
That's what I try to do with my stories. I can't write a story simply connecting events to events. I take a deep map of character motivation and whatever resonance seems to be relevant at the time, whether in history or in thought, to try and explore the story the way readers are subsequently asked to interpret it. I'm a reader who believes a story isn't just a sequence of events, either, but something that's only worth anything if I take something positive from it. I don't read just to read. And so I don't write just to write, either. I want to present a challenge to the reader, not a puzzle but something to think about. And the way mystery writers leave clues all over the place, I try and start the thought process by beginning it within the story itself.
And I like to have a little fun. I love to make associations. Hopefully, anyone who's read my blogging knows that much. I got the idea to do this in fiction by Neil Gaiman's Sandman, one of the most mythology-rich comics ever written, and subsequently one of those classic hard-to-translate challenges filmmakers have been attempting to solve for years. (Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the most recent brave soul to tackle it. Wish him luck!)
But the thing is, I hadn't read Sandman by the time I wrote Pale Moonlight, except for a few random issues. It was a challenge I knew I wanted to take, but needed time to prepare for it. I'm still only about twenty issues in, and can see how challenging Gaiman really made it. His lead character most often appears as a supporting character. Of any work of fiction I've encountered to date, it's Gaiman's opus that comes closest to the kind of work I hope to accomplish as a writer.
(I am not saying I am Gaiman's equal. That is for others to decide!)
Other experiences helped lead the way. Douglas Adams packed his Hitchhiker's books with asides from the title fictional cosmic encyclopedia, for instance, and although they don't really have anything to do with Arthur Dent's adventures, they are an essential element to their enjoyment. Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes presented every facet of childhood exactly the way a child experiences it, which meant reading the comic strip was itself a master class of wildly different approaches week to week.
I also drew a lot of formatting ideas from television. TV is a uniquely modern form of storytelling, more often than not episodic, in that the story from week to week may not be directly related but taken as a whole there is clearly a common thread throughout a series. Some of the more ambitious shows I've enjoyed, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Boomtown being completed by the time I started writing novel manuscripts, were particularly influential. I have the feeling that drawing such inspiration from TV will become more and more apparent as future generations of writers emerge.
Lost was another major source of inspiration. When I began writing The Cloak of Shrouded Men, the show had only just begun, but when I finished the story that became my first book, the series had by then reached its third season, with more than ample demonstration of its unique approach to TV storytelling. I consider it an honor to admit that I took writing advice from Lost.
The idea of writing not so much a straight narrative but looking around the corners, I saw this as a natural fit for my interests, and by the time I tackled the manuscript for Pale Moonlight, I found it more and more impossible to do anything but what interested me as a writer, putting aside preconceived notions on what storytelling is supposed to do. The funny part is, as esoteric as Pale Moonlight is, it's still easier to understand, I think, than where I took the ending of Shrouded Men. In that sense, I'm following in the speculative footsteps of Christopher Nolan, another creative source who had wowed me with Memento and its less-known predecessor Following before I began my writing career in earnest.
But that review got me questioning this approach all over again. Did I write it like that because I was incapable of writing something more traditional? If I took out a given set of material, would that make it better, or simply easier to read? As writers, we're often told to edit our material, or completely rewrite. I consider a certain amount of that to be artistic compromise. In a collaborative medium like movies or TV, that can and probably should happen all the time. But writing a book? Particularly a story that plays by its own rules? It would be one thing if the author realizes it doesn't work. But is it okay for someone else to say it doesn't? Who's right?
Some of that has to do with the business of commercial value. I personally don't look at indy publishing as a commercial business. I'd love to make money from it, but that's not really why I do it.
So I guess what I'm saying this month is, my insecurity is also my greatest strength. I risk everything in hopes of gaining everything. And maybe some money, too.
This post is not really about my recent release, Pale Moonlight, but it was directly inspired by the book's first review. It was a terrible review. Made me wonder all over again if I'm crazy.
Except I started thinking, remembering why I write the way I write, and maybe it's not so crazy after all. There is, after all, a method to the madness. And if there's a method, maybe it's not madness after all...
The thing about Pale Moonlight is that it's a vampire story that's not really like any other vampire story you've read. I like to say that if you're not writing like you, you're not really writing at all. You're just filling a page with words. My style, my intent, is necessarily uniquely my own, but it isn't without precedent, or perhaps what they call inspiration.
I call my style, when I call it anything, deep map fiction. I borrow the term "deep map" from William Least Heat-Moon, one of the better-known travel writers, responsible for Blue Highways and various other books. The one I take the phrase from is PrairyErth, in which he explores an entire Kansas county on foot, or in other words taking a "deep map" of the territory. What he does is learn as much as possible about something, and then reports his findings.
That's what I try to do with my stories. I can't write a story simply connecting events to events. I take a deep map of character motivation and whatever resonance seems to be relevant at the time, whether in history or in thought, to try and explore the story the way readers are subsequently asked to interpret it. I'm a reader who believes a story isn't just a sequence of events, either, but something that's only worth anything if I take something positive from it. I don't read just to read. And so I don't write just to write, either. I want to present a challenge to the reader, not a puzzle but something to think about. And the way mystery writers leave clues all over the place, I try and start the thought process by beginning it within the story itself.
And I like to have a little fun. I love to make associations. Hopefully, anyone who's read my blogging knows that much. I got the idea to do this in fiction by Neil Gaiman's Sandman, one of the most mythology-rich comics ever written, and subsequently one of those classic hard-to-translate challenges filmmakers have been attempting to solve for years. (Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the most recent brave soul to tackle it. Wish him luck!)
But the thing is, I hadn't read Sandman by the time I wrote Pale Moonlight, except for a few random issues. It was a challenge I knew I wanted to take, but needed time to prepare for it. I'm still only about twenty issues in, and can see how challenging Gaiman really made it. His lead character most often appears as a supporting character. Of any work of fiction I've encountered to date, it's Gaiman's opus that comes closest to the kind of work I hope to accomplish as a writer.
(I am not saying I am Gaiman's equal. That is for others to decide!)
Other experiences helped lead the way. Douglas Adams packed his Hitchhiker's books with asides from the title fictional cosmic encyclopedia, for instance, and although they don't really have anything to do with Arthur Dent's adventures, they are an essential element to their enjoyment. Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes presented every facet of childhood exactly the way a child experiences it, which meant reading the comic strip was itself a master class of wildly different approaches week to week.
I also drew a lot of formatting ideas from television. TV is a uniquely modern form of storytelling, more often than not episodic, in that the story from week to week may not be directly related but taken as a whole there is clearly a common thread throughout a series. Some of the more ambitious shows I've enjoyed, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Boomtown being completed by the time I started writing novel manuscripts, were particularly influential. I have the feeling that drawing such inspiration from TV will become more and more apparent as future generations of writers emerge.
Lost was another major source of inspiration. When I began writing The Cloak of Shrouded Men, the show had only just begun, but when I finished the story that became my first book, the series had by then reached its third season, with more than ample demonstration of its unique approach to TV storytelling. I consider it an honor to admit that I took writing advice from Lost.
The idea of writing not so much a straight narrative but looking around the corners, I saw this as a natural fit for my interests, and by the time I tackled the manuscript for Pale Moonlight, I found it more and more impossible to do anything but what interested me as a writer, putting aside preconceived notions on what storytelling is supposed to do. The funny part is, as esoteric as Pale Moonlight is, it's still easier to understand, I think, than where I took the ending of Shrouded Men. In that sense, I'm following in the speculative footsteps of Christopher Nolan, another creative source who had wowed me with Memento and its less-known predecessor Following before I began my writing career in earnest.
But that review got me questioning this approach all over again. Did I write it like that because I was incapable of writing something more traditional? If I took out a given set of material, would that make it better, or simply easier to read? As writers, we're often told to edit our material, or completely rewrite. I consider a certain amount of that to be artistic compromise. In a collaborative medium like movies or TV, that can and probably should happen all the time. But writing a book? Particularly a story that plays by its own rules? It would be one thing if the author realizes it doesn't work. But is it okay for someone else to say it doesn't? Who's right?
Some of that has to do with the business of commercial value. I personally don't look at indy publishing as a commercial business. I'd love to make money from it, but that's not really why I do it.
So I guess what I'm saying this month is, my insecurity is also my greatest strength. I risk everything in hopes of gaining everything. And maybe some money, too.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
IWSG January 2014
I'm experiencing a small hiccup in my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea.
I've completed the first and largest section of the manuscript, and that's all well and good. That's the most important part of the story. The section I haven't started yet is the shortest. But it might also be the trickiest. You see, I'm writing about Hurricane Katrina. The main characters are black.
I am not myself black. I've written black main characters before. Actually, the whole cast of characters in Cloak of Shrouded Men is black, basically (it really only becomes apparent in the third section of that one, but I treat it as a complete nonissue otherwise). I've written other ethnic characters, too, such as Yoshimi. Katrina is a major exception to this rule, though. It's a topic that breached a considerable amount of controversy in the halls of American racial identity. Then-President Bush was accused of responding slowly to the devastation it caused because it affected mostly blacks.
This is something I will have to address. For whatever reason, Katrina has stuck with me, even though I've never lived anywhere near the affected area, never had family even remotely close until last year when my brother and his wife moved to Louisiana (although far away from any relevant locations). It was another of those epochal moments in Bush's presidency. Don't hate me when I say I have a favorable opinion of him. People tend to react negatively to bad situations (for some reason!), and they always look for someone to blame. I've tended to believe that Bush got the reaction he did to that moment because of this instinct.
Be that as it may, it is something I need to address in the story. Some of it I've drawn from the excellent movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, which doesn't really address the racial undertones of Katrina's impact even though it features a mostly black cast. The main character in this section of Pangaea is mostly concerned with locating his missing wife after they're separated during the storm.
But he will have to address the same thing Spike Lee did in When the Levees Broke. The government response to the disaster was found to be inadequate. I tend to get inside the head of my characters. This will have to factor into the main character's thinking, no matter what else he may focus on.
Am I at all qualified to address such things? The fact that I've been thinking about Katrina since it hit in 2005 means I still have to process it for myself. It's not surprising that it ended up in the plotting of one of my stories. At the very least it will be one of my biggest challenges to date, to do justice to something that drastically changed so many lives and unexpectedly spoke to far more than a conversation about severely bad weather.
I hope I'm up to the task. Sometimes it's hard just to represent my own people, if you'll allow me to talk about ethnic identity in a broader context. I've written before about being a Franco American who feels he's a generation removed from understanding what that means. That will play a part in the third section of Pangaea, certainly. I've never written a manuscript, part or a whole, from this perspective. A large part of the reason I wanted to write Pangaea at all was so I could finally do that. Maybe writing about Katrina will help make that easier.
I don't know. I can only try.
I've completed the first and largest section of the manuscript, and that's all well and good. That's the most important part of the story. The section I haven't started yet is the shortest. But it might also be the trickiest. You see, I'm writing about Hurricane Katrina. The main characters are black.
I am not myself black. I've written black main characters before. Actually, the whole cast of characters in Cloak of Shrouded Men is black, basically (it really only becomes apparent in the third section of that one, but I treat it as a complete nonissue otherwise). I've written other ethnic characters, too, such as Yoshimi. Katrina is a major exception to this rule, though. It's a topic that breached a considerable amount of controversy in the halls of American racial identity. Then-President Bush was accused of responding slowly to the devastation it caused because it affected mostly blacks.
This is something I will have to address. For whatever reason, Katrina has stuck with me, even though I've never lived anywhere near the affected area, never had family even remotely close until last year when my brother and his wife moved to Louisiana (although far away from any relevant locations). It was another of those epochal moments in Bush's presidency. Don't hate me when I say I have a favorable opinion of him. People tend to react negatively to bad situations (for some reason!), and they always look for someone to blame. I've tended to believe that Bush got the reaction he did to that moment because of this instinct.
Be that as it may, it is something I need to address in the story. Some of it I've drawn from the excellent movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, which doesn't really address the racial undertones of Katrina's impact even though it features a mostly black cast. The main character in this section of Pangaea is mostly concerned with locating his missing wife after they're separated during the storm.
But he will have to address the same thing Spike Lee did in When the Levees Broke. The government response to the disaster was found to be inadequate. I tend to get inside the head of my characters. This will have to factor into the main character's thinking, no matter what else he may focus on.
Am I at all qualified to address such things? The fact that I've been thinking about Katrina since it hit in 2005 means I still have to process it for myself. It's not surprising that it ended up in the plotting of one of my stories. At the very least it will be one of my biggest challenges to date, to do justice to something that drastically changed so many lives and unexpectedly spoke to far more than a conversation about severely bad weather.
I hope I'm up to the task. Sometimes it's hard just to represent my own people, if you'll allow me to talk about ethnic identity in a broader context. I've written before about being a Franco American who feels he's a generation removed from understanding what that means. That will play a part in the third section of Pangaea, certainly. I've never written a manuscript, part or a whole, from this perspective. A large part of the reason I wanted to write Pangaea at all was so I could finally do that. Maybe writing about Katrina will help make that easier.
I don't know. I can only try.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
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...
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...
Monday, October 21, 2013
Sending queries
I just sent off a new query for Modern Ark.
This is significant for a number of reasons. A few years back I went through a long period of sending queries for this manuscript, and didn't get anywhere with it. I was as frustrated as you can get in this process.
It was the first manuscript I'd done this with, the first book-length story I'd completed after the three NaNos that produced The Cloak of Shrouded Men, a superhero story I had less faith in finding a home for than something that featured vampires.
I completed the first draft of Modern Ark in 2009 (which seems like a lifetime of several lifetimes ago now). Since that time I'd gotten to think of it as the first of the yearly manuscripts I've managed to complete to date, but it's also a particular baby of mine, no matter how difficult it's been.
It was supposed to be a simple story, and yet it became what remains my most elaborate and complicated one.
And that has made it difficult for me to sometimes think of in the simple ways that are necessary to make it seem attractive to publishers. If they can't understand it, they will find it all the more difficult for readers to comprehend. Who wants to look at a book in the store that they don't get on a basic perusal? Me, I like to choose the books that come with praise I can respect, the careful cultivation of trusted writers. But that's just not the way most people choose their books.
The first readers are always the ones you have to solicit. Not the ones who are potentially glomming onto a phenomenon, however big or small. You need to capture attention with the work itself for those initial readers. And only so many of them are doing it for the sheer love of reading, of discovery. Only so many readers approach a book like the most discerning critic. Here I imagine Anton Ego (so brilliantly voiced by the ever-evolving Peter O'Toole) in Ratatouille. These people are hard to impress. These are the readers I imagine as my best audience.
But I can't even begin to imagine facing them if I can't get the thing published. And so I face rejection with fortification. I try to understand my own story. And that's something I've tried to do with Modern Ark for years.
It's perfectly possible to overthink even a complicated plot. The thing any writer always needs is the ability to see even their own work with clarity. Especially their own work.
I'm not talking about interpretation. Interpretation's another bag entirely.
Clarity is the first mark of inspiration. It's why you want to write a story in the first place. Except that story can sometimes evolve into something else as you're writing it. That happened every other chapter in Modern Ark. And so I needed to rediscover the clarity of the work, not in broad idealistic strokes but for what it was, what had never changed despite everything that ended up in it.
And so that's how I ended up writing this latest query. Even if this one also ends up going nowhere, I'm starting to see real progress in this process.
And I'm starting to feel good about Modern Ark again.
This is significant for a number of reasons. A few years back I went through a long period of sending queries for this manuscript, and didn't get anywhere with it. I was as frustrated as you can get in this process.
It was the first manuscript I'd done this with, the first book-length story I'd completed after the three NaNos that produced The Cloak of Shrouded Men, a superhero story I had less faith in finding a home for than something that featured vampires.
I completed the first draft of Modern Ark in 2009 (which seems like a lifetime of several lifetimes ago now). Since that time I'd gotten to think of it as the first of the yearly manuscripts I've managed to complete to date, but it's also a particular baby of mine, no matter how difficult it's been.
It was supposed to be a simple story, and yet it became what remains my most elaborate and complicated one.
And that has made it difficult for me to sometimes think of in the simple ways that are necessary to make it seem attractive to publishers. If they can't understand it, they will find it all the more difficult for readers to comprehend. Who wants to look at a book in the store that they don't get on a basic perusal? Me, I like to choose the books that come with praise I can respect, the careful cultivation of trusted writers. But that's just not the way most people choose their books.
The first readers are always the ones you have to solicit. Not the ones who are potentially glomming onto a phenomenon, however big or small. You need to capture attention with the work itself for those initial readers. And only so many of them are doing it for the sheer love of reading, of discovery. Only so many readers approach a book like the most discerning critic. Here I imagine Anton Ego (so brilliantly voiced by the ever-evolving Peter O'Toole) in Ratatouille. These people are hard to impress. These are the readers I imagine as my best audience.
But I can't even begin to imagine facing them if I can't get the thing published. And so I face rejection with fortification. I try to understand my own story. And that's something I've tried to do with Modern Ark for years.
It's perfectly possible to overthink even a complicated plot. The thing any writer always needs is the ability to see even their own work with clarity. Especially their own work.
I'm not talking about interpretation. Interpretation's another bag entirely.
Clarity is the first mark of inspiration. It's why you want to write a story in the first place. Except that story can sometimes evolve into something else as you're writing it. That happened every other chapter in Modern Ark. And so I needed to rediscover the clarity of the work, not in broad idealistic strokes but for what it was, what had never changed despite everything that ended up in it.
And so that's how I ended up writing this latest query. Even if this one also ends up going nowhere, I'm starting to see real progress in this process.
And I'm starting to feel good about Modern Ark again.
Monday, April 8, 2013
(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.
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.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
How to Write a Novel
Part of this can be explained by a very strange modern word: NaNoWriMo. Those familiar with it (and in my Interweb journeys over the past seven years, I've discovered few communities unaware of it) know that these letters stand for National Novel Writing Month, which rolls around each November, and is a challenge to write 50,000 words within its thirty days.
This was something I first did back in 2004. The story as I famously recall it goes that I had been intending to write one story for weeks leading up to November, but came up with something else entirely on the 1st. This is fine, because as part of the challenge you're supposed to do all of the work during the month, including outlining. Somehow I survived that first NaNo. Naturally, when I repeated the process during the next two years, I cheated, by continuing the same story (which eventually became The Cloak of Shrouded Men).
My method for success was simple enough. I calculated the exact number of words I would need to write each day, assuming that I was able to set time aside each day, in order to end up with 50,000 at the end of the month. With that total (1,667) in mind, I started writing. At some point I started figuring out what I wanted to do with the characters I'd created, where they needed to go, what needed to be revealed about them, but in such rough sketches that I wonder how I survived and succeeded. There was only a small amount of additional planning in succeeding Novembers.
The interesting part is that the daily wordcount became something of a guidepost. I regularly missed days and had to catch up. By 2006 I wrote far fewer than thirty chapters (one a day with that specific wordcount) because I ended up doubling up so often. By that method I started to realize the potential to get away from the wordcount goal and to simply start writing.
If that sounds simple, then I'm only half-serious about my success in that regard.
In 2007 I had my first unsuccessful NaNo. I got behind early and tried to catch up, but it just wasn't working. I gave up and walked away from the story, and still haven't gone back to it. Perhaps tellingly, I never officially participated in the event again.
As far as writing goes, I should probably admit at this point that I had never written a novel, or attempted one, before NaNo in 2004. I'd written short stories, and not the short stories that I tend to write now. I even started writing short stories in installments, which is something I still do now. Yet it had never occurred to me to try a novel. When I graduated from college in December of 2003, I had the vague notion of writing one, but other than what I wanted to write, I had no idea how to start. (It probably explains my general lack of success.)
NaNo gave me all kinds of inspiration, and confidence to know that I could actually do it. I wrote my first non-NaNo novel (although come to think of it, shouldn't Chris Baty, or someone else, launch the imprint National Novels already?) in 2009. It was Finnegan, and I wrote the same general length and in the same general increments that I'd learned writing Shrouded Men, but instead of over the course of three years, over the span of months. I made all the plans in the world on this one, or so I thought, and it ended up being almost completely different than what I'd expected. This was how I learned what kind of novel writer I really was. It directly informed my experience writing Ecce Homo (or, Minor Contracts as I've since renamed it) the next year.
Last year I wrote Yoshimi, but this time I was determined to rewrite my own rules. I wrote it with a publisher in mind, and knew that some of my old tricks wouldn't fly. One of the rules I rewrote was the wordcount per chapter, and for me it was a radical change that took a learning curve to master. Once I did, I surprised myself again. As I've said, I tended when I started to write a relatively small amount of words per day, and that would be a chapter. With Yoshimi I determined that each chapter would be 10,000 words. You see the difference?
Well, trust me, it was a big difference. I had another outline for this one, and I was determined to stick to it. I'd put a lot of work into it, and thought for sure that I knew exactly what I was going to write this time. (I was wrong, mostly, about that, too.) I rewrote the opening of the book several times. I'd done that before, with short stories. The tone, the approach, doesn't seem right. (I've even redrafted after completing a manuscript, for the record, changing chapters after the fact.)
Eventually (and let's be honest, because at the time I had the time), I struck on the ability to write each 10,000 word chapter in a single day. It completely revolutionized the writing of that book. I'd never done anything like that before, not even on those desperate days when I thought writing a mere two 1,667 word chapters in a single day was a big deal.
(I don't remember exact wordcounts for any papers where I wrote in similar marathon sessions at college, so we'll just pretend I'm awesome and leave it at that.)
This year and since last month I've been writing Seven Thunders, a novel I've been planning since 1998. I realize now that the book I needed to make of it wouldn't have been possible if I'd attempted to write it earlier. The learning curve I've been describing has been absolutely essential, plus many other things I've learned since that year. I've cut the 10,000 chapter wordcount by half, and so far that has been going fairly well. I cannot lie and say writing novels isn't still scary at times, not the least for the fact that I still have not successfully made a career of selling these manuscripts as easily as I've learned to write them. There are still moments where I ask myself if I'm still just pretending to do it rather than actually succeeding. I'll find out eventually.
I've learned that for me, the idea of writing every day is not only not possible, but counterintuitive. You don't force writing. If you do you probably should regret it. The approach you need will not always be apparent, and writing without that inspiration and hoping to revise around it later...to me sounds like the worst idea imaginable. Give yourself a timetable and the way to reach it, and you'll get there. Unless you're on a specific deadline, it doesn't even matter if you miss that timetable anyway, but it'll make you feel good to hit it. The writing will work itself out. The story will shape itself. Even if you have the most comprehensive outline possible, if you stick only to that, then you've probably again sabotaged your own efforts. Novel writing should surprise you. I don't know how to emphasize that more. If the shape of your story isn't organic, your reader will notice. If they don't, they're not much of a reader. So I just said that.
It seems as if most writers I read about these days depend on beta readers more than they do their own abilities to know if they've succeeded. A beta reader is still a reader. They can suggest changes, but they're still a reader. Unless you're in a position where you absolutely must satisfy someone else's perspective, yours is the only one that counts. You're the writer. Deal with it. If you can't, you ought to find another calling (though that's a funny thing to say, isn't it?).
That's it, then. That's my thoughts on how to write a novel.
This was something I first did back in 2004. The story as I famously recall it goes that I had been intending to write one story for weeks leading up to November, but came up with something else entirely on the 1st. This is fine, because as part of the challenge you're supposed to do all of the work during the month, including outlining. Somehow I survived that first NaNo. Naturally, when I repeated the process during the next two years, I cheated, by continuing the same story (which eventually became The Cloak of Shrouded Men).
My method for success was simple enough. I calculated the exact number of words I would need to write each day, assuming that I was able to set time aside each day, in order to end up with 50,000 at the end of the month. With that total (1,667) in mind, I started writing. At some point I started figuring out what I wanted to do with the characters I'd created, where they needed to go, what needed to be revealed about them, but in such rough sketches that I wonder how I survived and succeeded. There was only a small amount of additional planning in succeeding Novembers.
The interesting part is that the daily wordcount became something of a guidepost. I regularly missed days and had to catch up. By 2006 I wrote far fewer than thirty chapters (one a day with that specific wordcount) because I ended up doubling up so often. By that method I started to realize the potential to get away from the wordcount goal and to simply start writing.
If that sounds simple, then I'm only half-serious about my success in that regard.
In 2007 I had my first unsuccessful NaNo. I got behind early and tried to catch up, but it just wasn't working. I gave up and walked away from the story, and still haven't gone back to it. Perhaps tellingly, I never officially participated in the event again.
As far as writing goes, I should probably admit at this point that I had never written a novel, or attempted one, before NaNo in 2004. I'd written short stories, and not the short stories that I tend to write now. I even started writing short stories in installments, which is something I still do now. Yet it had never occurred to me to try a novel. When I graduated from college in December of 2003, I had the vague notion of writing one, but other than what I wanted to write, I had no idea how to start. (It probably explains my general lack of success.)
NaNo gave me all kinds of inspiration, and confidence to know that I could actually do it. I wrote my first non-NaNo novel (although come to think of it, shouldn't Chris Baty, or someone else, launch the imprint National Novels already?) in 2009. It was Finnegan, and I wrote the same general length and in the same general increments that I'd learned writing Shrouded Men, but instead of over the course of three years, over the span of months. I made all the plans in the world on this one, or so I thought, and it ended up being almost completely different than what I'd expected. This was how I learned what kind of novel writer I really was. It directly informed my experience writing Ecce Homo (or, Minor Contracts as I've since renamed it) the next year.
Last year I wrote Yoshimi, but this time I was determined to rewrite my own rules. I wrote it with a publisher in mind, and knew that some of my old tricks wouldn't fly. One of the rules I rewrote was the wordcount per chapter, and for me it was a radical change that took a learning curve to master. Once I did, I surprised myself again. As I've said, I tended when I started to write a relatively small amount of words per day, and that would be a chapter. With Yoshimi I determined that each chapter would be 10,000 words. You see the difference?
Well, trust me, it was a big difference. I had another outline for this one, and I was determined to stick to it. I'd put a lot of work into it, and thought for sure that I knew exactly what I was going to write this time. (I was wrong, mostly, about that, too.) I rewrote the opening of the book several times. I'd done that before, with short stories. The tone, the approach, doesn't seem right. (I've even redrafted after completing a manuscript, for the record, changing chapters after the fact.)
Eventually (and let's be honest, because at the time I had the time), I struck on the ability to write each 10,000 word chapter in a single day. It completely revolutionized the writing of that book. I'd never done anything like that before, not even on those desperate days when I thought writing a mere two 1,667 word chapters in a single day was a big deal.
(I don't remember exact wordcounts for any papers where I wrote in similar marathon sessions at college, so we'll just pretend I'm awesome and leave it at that.)
This year and since last month I've been writing Seven Thunders, a novel I've been planning since 1998. I realize now that the book I needed to make of it wouldn't have been possible if I'd attempted to write it earlier. The learning curve I've been describing has been absolutely essential, plus many other things I've learned since that year. I've cut the 10,000 chapter wordcount by half, and so far that has been going fairly well. I cannot lie and say writing novels isn't still scary at times, not the least for the fact that I still have not successfully made a career of selling these manuscripts as easily as I've learned to write them. There are still moments where I ask myself if I'm still just pretending to do it rather than actually succeeding. I'll find out eventually.
I've learned that for me, the idea of writing every day is not only not possible, but counterintuitive. You don't force writing. If you do you probably should regret it. The approach you need will not always be apparent, and writing without that inspiration and hoping to revise around it later...to me sounds like the worst idea imaginable. Give yourself a timetable and the way to reach it, and you'll get there. Unless you're on a specific deadline, it doesn't even matter if you miss that timetable anyway, but it'll make you feel good to hit it. The writing will work itself out. The story will shape itself. Even if you have the most comprehensive outline possible, if you stick only to that, then you've probably again sabotaged your own efforts. Novel writing should surprise you. I don't know how to emphasize that more. If the shape of your story isn't organic, your reader will notice. If they don't, they're not much of a reader. So I just said that.
It seems as if most writers I read about these days depend on beta readers more than they do their own abilities to know if they've succeeded. A beta reader is still a reader. They can suggest changes, but they're still a reader. Unless you're in a position where you absolutely must satisfy someone else's perspective, yours is the only one that counts. You're the writer. Deal with it. If you can't, you ought to find another calling (though that's a funny thing to say, isn't it?).
That's it, then. That's my thoughts on how to write a novel.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Writing Seven Thunders
Writing Seven Thunders is a process that has so far taken fifteen years.
I have not written a single page. I've written a few opening lines, but for the record, I have not started writing it yet. Some people would no doubt find that to be a tad preposterous, especially in an era where anyone can be published, anyone will write.
Seven Thunders is something I've considered to be my potential masterpiece. Now that I've written a few books (books I did not spend fifteen years planning), I can no longer say that with so much certainty, but it's still incredibly important to me, perhaps my best shot at a truly popular novel (though Yoshimi could be that, once those pesky Hall Brothers get around to it).
Considering that the world around Seven Thunders has since become what will be a series of books beside it in the form of Space Corps, perhaps some of what delayed my writing it has dulled some of the impact. I never planned to write more books around it. I don't know what I expected to do with the rest of the material (at some point I thought they might be TV shows, and more recently, comic books), but recently I started thinking of them as books, around the time I stopped thinking of Seven Thunders as a trilogy and more like the format of Finnegan, the first book I wrote deliberately, after The Cloak of Shrouded Men, which like Finnegan also takes three acts to conclude its story. Only Ecce Homo so far (because Yoshimi does, too) doesn't follow this pattern so far, but I'm not sure I'm done editing its final shape.
Seven Thunders is named thus because of the DC Comics graphic novel Kingdom Come, which referenced the Book of Revelation and the thunder in some of its original advertising. The thunders in the context of my book are the seven main characters, who have remained more or the less the same since I first sketched them out. Another of the refinements I've figured out very recently is that two of them are brothers, like in Prison Break, grown up and still trying to reconcile the complications of their past that still affect them in the present.
I figure I will finally start writing Seven Thunders in October, and shoot to complete each of its three acts one per month until the end of the year. I still haven't exactly decided how long it'll be, but I'm sure I'll know. I've now had ample practice doing this, having now done it four other times, which is still a little incredible to think. Since I haven't been too successful in finding publishers or making the decision to self-publish (Monorama being an exception and another learning experience), I still think of myself as a budding writer. Possibly because as far as success goes, I wouldn't know too much about it.
Well, the rest of the year should be interesting anyway...
I have not written a single page. I've written a few opening lines, but for the record, I have not started writing it yet. Some people would no doubt find that to be a tad preposterous, especially in an era where anyone can be published, anyone will write.
Seven Thunders is something I've considered to be my potential masterpiece. Now that I've written a few books (books I did not spend fifteen years planning), I can no longer say that with so much certainty, but it's still incredibly important to me, perhaps my best shot at a truly popular novel (though Yoshimi could be that, once those pesky Hall Brothers get around to it).
Considering that the world around Seven Thunders has since become what will be a series of books beside it in the form of Space Corps, perhaps some of what delayed my writing it has dulled some of the impact. I never planned to write more books around it. I don't know what I expected to do with the rest of the material (at some point I thought they might be TV shows, and more recently, comic books), but recently I started thinking of them as books, around the time I stopped thinking of Seven Thunders as a trilogy and more like the format of Finnegan, the first book I wrote deliberately, after The Cloak of Shrouded Men, which like Finnegan also takes three acts to conclude its story. Only Ecce Homo so far (because Yoshimi does, too) doesn't follow this pattern so far, but I'm not sure I'm done editing its final shape.
Seven Thunders is named thus because of the DC Comics graphic novel Kingdom Come, which referenced the Book of Revelation and the thunder in some of its original advertising. The thunders in the context of my book are the seven main characters, who have remained more or the less the same since I first sketched them out. Another of the refinements I've figured out very recently is that two of them are brothers, like in Prison Break, grown up and still trying to reconcile the complications of their past that still affect them in the present.
I figure I will finally start writing Seven Thunders in October, and shoot to complete each of its three acts one per month until the end of the year. I still haven't exactly decided how long it'll be, but I'm sure I'll know. I've now had ample practice doing this, having now done it four other times, which is still a little incredible to think. Since I haven't been too successful in finding publishers or making the decision to self-publish (Monorama being an exception and another learning experience), I still think of myself as a budding writer. Possibly because as far as success goes, I wouldn't know too much about it.
Well, the rest of the year should be interesting anyway...
Monday, July 16, 2012
Welcome
I've just signed up for DL Hammons' 2012 WRiTE CLUB. I'm also participating in Martin T. Ingham's Shootout, so I'll be a busy little writer, and that's not even counting the fact that I've got my own projects to work on and a new book to prep, Seven Thunders, which will be the first installment in the Space Corps series, something I've been working on for almost twenty years.
Who am I? I'm Spider-Man. Just kidding, I'm Tony Laplume. I just recently released a collection of short stories:
I've been putting that together since last fall, writing most of the stories since January 2011, and in fact have also included a Space Corps story from 2003 and a novella from 2005, just for good measure, as well as a few slightly more recent efforts, but from outside of that general timeframe. You can get a print edition or Kindle edition. Or you can just look at the pretty cover.
I self-published that earlier this month, and self-published The Cloak of Shrouded Men in 2007. That's a gritty superhero story about the illusion of control and its corrupting influence. It was written in three successive Novembers as part of National Novel Writing Month, which was the only way I was going to write my first book. I have since completed three additional manuscripts.
I currently have another book, Yoshimi, preparing to be published by Hall Bros. Entertainment, which if everything goes according to plan should be published later this summer.
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