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.
Showing posts with label Yoshimi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yoshimi. Show all posts
Monday, March 31, 2014
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.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Yoshimi returns? (a blatant plea for artistic collaborators)
I'm currently looking for artistic collaborators on comic book projects. I'm lousy at making these connections, so I'm making a blatant plea right here. If you want to humor me, here's your chance.
It's funny, too, because with all my rotten luck breaking into comics, the last missed opportunity ended up providing me with a major plot element for my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea. Based on a scenario originally envisioned by artist Don Bryan and further developed by me, I tried to keep the project alive (read an aborted effort here) until I totally repurposed it. That's all well and good, but at the time I really wanted it to remain a comic book.
The couple of Bluewater biography scripts I've had published have only whet my appetite. I want to do some original work now. I want to do it badly. I want to work in the sandboxes of other people, too. Mainly, I want this creative outlet.
The (main) title of this post references Yoshimi, who's the featured protagonist of The Whole Bloody Affair, the source of another tortured march to publication. I've been wondering if there was ever going to be another Yoshimi story. The dramatic arc of her life completed itself before she hit sixteen years old, so I wondered what could possibly justify bringing her back. And then it struck me. She doesn't have to be the main character.
So that's how she appears in my initial notes for Boxer, one of the comic book projects I've cooked up and would love to develop with an artistic collaborator, maybe shop around to publishers (because most of them really love not having to do that themselves, the creative team for a project they didn't come up with). Boxer is my high school drama. The main character is the eponymous figure, and she's not herself a boxer. That's her mom. Her story is about establishing a legacy of her own, which is funny because that contrasts so well with Yoshimi's unexpected return. There's another character who's the narrator, sort of like how Brian K. Vaughan has cleverly made a star out of the narrator in his Saga. This narrator also happens to dramatically affect the shape of the whole story, because this is her interpretation, and she sometimes lets her imagination get away with her. (Yes, somehow all three leads are female.)
If I make a big deal out of my hopes for Boxer out of a half dozen other potential comic book projects, it's because this is the one I'd probably most like to see move forward first.
If you know anyone who could help me with this, let me know. If you only want to wish me well, thank you for that as well! Either way, this will be one of my major goals for 2014, just so you know, that along with finding a publisher for Seven Thunders, and maybe one or more of my other manuscripts. 2013 was hopefully the last push for my self-publishing efforts. We'll see!
It's funny, too, because with all my rotten luck breaking into comics, the last missed opportunity ended up providing me with a major plot element for my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea. Based on a scenario originally envisioned by artist Don Bryan and further developed by me, I tried to keep the project alive (read an aborted effort here) until I totally repurposed it. That's all well and good, but at the time I really wanted it to remain a comic book.
The couple of Bluewater biography scripts I've had published have only whet my appetite. I want to do some original work now. I want to do it badly. I want to work in the sandboxes of other people, too. Mainly, I want this creative outlet.
The (main) title of this post references Yoshimi, who's the featured protagonist of The Whole Bloody Affair, the source of another tortured march to publication. I've been wondering if there was ever going to be another Yoshimi story. The dramatic arc of her life completed itself before she hit sixteen years old, so I wondered what could possibly justify bringing her back. And then it struck me. She doesn't have to be the main character.
So that's how she appears in my initial notes for Boxer, one of the comic book projects I've cooked up and would love to develop with an artistic collaborator, maybe shop around to publishers (because most of them really love not having to do that themselves, the creative team for a project they didn't come up with). Boxer is my high school drama. The main character is the eponymous figure, and she's not herself a boxer. That's her mom. Her story is about establishing a legacy of her own, which is funny because that contrasts so well with Yoshimi's unexpected return. There's another character who's the narrator, sort of like how Brian K. Vaughan has cleverly made a star out of the narrator in his Saga. This narrator also happens to dramatically affect the shape of the whole story, because this is her interpretation, and she sometimes lets her imagination get away with her. (Yes, somehow all three leads are female.)
If I make a big deal out of my hopes for Boxer out of a half dozen other potential comic book projects, it's because this is the one I'd probably most like to see move forward first.
If you know anyone who could help me with this, let me know. If you only want to wish me well, thank you for that as well! Either way, this will be one of my major goals for 2014, just so you know, that along with finding a publisher for Seven Thunders, and maybe one or more of my other manuscripts. 2013 was hopefully the last push for my self-publishing efforts. We'll see!
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
The Complete Yoshimi comes to paperback
That would be the cover for The Whole Bloody Affair, a.k.a. The Complete Yoshimi.
Available here in paperback!
For those unfamiliar with Yoshimi and her fictional and well as publishing history, here's a brief recap: The warrior orphan was originally conceived at the behest of a friend's budding publishing label. They were just getting into the business of releasing novels at the time, and I saw this as an opportunity. I don't tend to write terrifically straightforward fiction (in other words, I'm more of a literary guy than James Patterson, or in other other words I'm not usually very commercial in the traditional sense). Yoshimi's story was immediately cast in the vein of things I'd enjoyed, in books and film (and her name taken from a Flaming Lips album), the revenge plot.
The complete story is very similar to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third in that series, while it borrows significantly from Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's Kill Bill. The truth isn't always what it seems, and Yoshimi has a lot of people to defeat along the way. (So, she's also similar to Scott Pilgrim!)
The small publisher folded in the midst of the planning stages for the book's release.
Earlier this year I started and intended to release each of the book's three volumes separately. Then a lot of things very rapidly changed for me, and I lost the original schedule. When things finally settled down again, I had the impulse to release the whole story in a single volume, as I had intended to at the conclusion of the serialization. And so here we are.
As for the cover, I've pretty much been sticking to the available templates at CreateSpace, and that's true again here. The color scheme is an homage to the iconic posters for Kill Bill, Vol. 1 while also evoking the red pattern for the second (here it takes the shape of an ominous field of blood).
As to whether or not I'm trying to trick unsuspecting consumers into buying my book by using a phrase closely associated with Kill Bill, well, as far as I figure, Tarantino is in no rush to use it, and it has a nice ring. Why not? (Then again, perhaps I'll find out.)
...Of course, it's my fervent wish that this is the very last book I'll ever have to release myself, and I hope I'm going out with a bang.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
The Whole Bloody Affair
Friday night I undertook another marathon session with Amazon's CreateSpace to put together the release of The Whole Bloody Affair, a.k.a. The Complete Yoshimi.
And you can thank Miley Cyrus for that. You may have heard a thing or two about Miley recently. I finally had a look at the VMA performance, and it struck me that she wasn't giving a performance so much as having a good time. Clearly trying really hard to be who she wants to be, and as such she's become a bona fide rock personality, the new Mick Jagger if you will (she's got the moves).
Anyway, and so I've had Yoshimi sitting around since 2011, and earlier this year I released the first volume of her adventures. I recently completed a move back to Maine, and I had computer files sitting there and I saw Miley twerk, and I thought, why not? So I put the package together and prepared The Whole Bloody Affair for release. It's not perfect. These self-made releases rarely are, and after Miley I guess I kind of decided it was okay. If I'm going to release something myself, I shouldn't stress so much about that.
So there it is. Once the book goes through the full release, I'll have a bunch of links, but here's one to start with. The cover, once you see it, is pretty simple, an homage to one of the inspirations for Yoshimi's story, Kill Bill, which I've been loving for a decade now.
If you want, help me spread the word, or wait for the Amazon and Kindle listings. Either way, I'm just glad that I've finally gotten the whole bloody thing out there.
And you can thank Miley Cyrus for that. You may have heard a thing or two about Miley recently. I finally had a look at the VMA performance, and it struck me that she wasn't giving a performance so much as having a good time. Clearly trying really hard to be who she wants to be, and as such she's become a bona fide rock personality, the new Mick Jagger if you will (she's got the moves).
Anyway, and so I've had Yoshimi sitting around since 2011, and earlier this year I released the first volume of her adventures. I recently completed a move back to Maine, and I had computer files sitting there and I saw Miley twerk, and I thought, why not? So I put the package together and prepared The Whole Bloody Affair for release. It's not perfect. These self-made releases rarely are, and after Miley I guess I kind of decided it was okay. If I'm going to release something myself, I shouldn't stress so much about that.
So there it is. Once the book goes through the full release, I'll have a bunch of links, but here's one to start with. The cover, once you see it, is pretty simple, an homage to one of the inspirations for Yoshimi's story, Kill Bill, which I've been loving for a decade now.
If you want, help me spread the word, or wait for the Amazon and Kindle listings. Either way, I'm just glad that I've finally gotten the whole bloody thing out there.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Adopted Thought
The first thing you need to know about Yoshimi, as featured in Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan, is that she's an orphan. I am not an orphan myself. I can understand, though, not just because they're a common trope in fiction, but because they're ultimately alienated individuals, who either lost or never knew their birth parents. The ones who don't end up in foster homes are especially alienated. We have families as a social rule for a reason, because they're the first best way to understand why it means to live in society.
The aspect of the orphan mindset that Yoshimi most closely embodies, however, is adopted thought. I define adopted thought as thought that is not native to oneself but rather learned from someone else. Some people live their entire lives subsisting on adopted thought. It's just easier to accept what someone else has told you to believe about something. Original thought is rare. Adopted thought is not inherently bad. Some people will just naturally assume that what they consider their original thought is in fact adopted thought. They internalize the behavior they observe in others.
This is a matter of the old nature vs. nurture debate. In psychology this is the phenomenon of determining how much of a person's psyche is determined internally and how much externally, or in other words learned or inherent behavior. Did you get it from someone or did it develop of its own accord?
To an orphan like Yoshimi, this is very much a pertinent question. From the perspective I took, she would be rebellious of all attempts to be placed in a foster home (which she fights against through thirty-six of them) because it would be like replacing her parents. How, then, would she know if anything that she becomes is from herself and her dead parents, and how much from the strangers who took her in? She's afraid of losing a link that only exists now in her mind.
Yet as the story develops she's told that everything she is, all her instincts, have been inherited from her parents, abilities she never knew she had but she's been using unconsciously all her life. Studies on twins, who have the exact same genetic material, have shown that when they're separated and raised in different environments develop, in fact, differently. I wasn't interested in taking a strictly scientific approach. Biologically we undoubtedly inherent certain genetic traits, obvious ones like facial structure, hair color, body type. The children of famous individuals often have a hard time living up to their parent's achievements, but a lot of that is simply the typical impossibility of facing pressure of that kind directly. Yoshimi is in the unique position of doing exactly that but without the pressure. Although since most of the people she subsequently encounters knew her parents, it's simply a matter of her own necessary ignorance.
When faced with a blank slate but a given set of art supplies, there's only a matter of variance. That's the story of writing. No matter how different, every story is the same, and it's a fool's errand to try and prove differently, much less rebel and deny and reject. In Shadow Clan Yoshimi encounters James Peers, who refuses to teach her traditional martial arts methods because he believes in a holistic approach, or in other words the nurture approach by way of nature, absorbing what will develop as it's experienced, using one's own instincts to take whatever form will develop.
In adopted thought, it's simply a matter of learning. That's what education is all about in school, taking what's given you without question. In original thought, it's an interactive experience. You accept and reject and modify as you deem necessary. Truth is not always obvious, even when it seems that it is.
The natural instinct of any guardian is to assume that the person you're taking responsibility for needs your guidance. If someone like Yoshimi doesn't believe that, or fears it, then there's very little to be gained by the experience. She's an orphan because that's what she is and what she believes she must continue to be. There was always the chance that a family may have presented itself that broke all her barriers. In fact, the complete story is all about how the people she meets end up being a different kind of family. They're all struggling against each other, but the real trick is that they don't let that get in the way. That's the true definition of family.
I have a problem with people who rely on adopted thought. I think it always shows, and it's damn depressing, because they never realize it themselves. It's not always a bad thing, but it's a phenomenon that causes more trouble than it's worth. Yes, it helps everyone function in a common direction, but it's also distrustful of dissenters, and that's never a good thing. You don't always need a sword to confront it, and maybe Yoshimi's real story is that she's awash in a sea of original thinkers who are all struggling against adopted thought.
Please note that I'm not arguing against foster homes or adoption, but rather the belief that it's okay to deny the identities of those who are entered into these equations. It only ever causes trouble. That's exactly what Yoshimi believes, and most of this is merely subtext. The story of Yoshimi is a metaphor for how tough life can be in any context, no matter what you believe or what you're struggling against.
Please note that I'm writing about Yoshimi, as well as the Space Corps, all month long over at Scouring Monk as part of the A-to-Z Challenge.
The aspect of the orphan mindset that Yoshimi most closely embodies, however, is adopted thought. I define adopted thought as thought that is not native to oneself but rather learned from someone else. Some people live their entire lives subsisting on adopted thought. It's just easier to accept what someone else has told you to believe about something. Original thought is rare. Adopted thought is not inherently bad. Some people will just naturally assume that what they consider their original thought is in fact adopted thought. They internalize the behavior they observe in others.
This is a matter of the old nature vs. nurture debate. In psychology this is the phenomenon of determining how much of a person's psyche is determined internally and how much externally, or in other words learned or inherent behavior. Did you get it from someone or did it develop of its own accord?
To an orphan like Yoshimi, this is very much a pertinent question. From the perspective I took, she would be rebellious of all attempts to be placed in a foster home (which she fights against through thirty-six of them) because it would be like replacing her parents. How, then, would she know if anything that she becomes is from herself and her dead parents, and how much from the strangers who took her in? She's afraid of losing a link that only exists now in her mind.
Yet as the story develops she's told that everything she is, all her instincts, have been inherited from her parents, abilities she never knew she had but she's been using unconsciously all her life. Studies on twins, who have the exact same genetic material, have shown that when they're separated and raised in different environments develop, in fact, differently. I wasn't interested in taking a strictly scientific approach. Biologically we undoubtedly inherent certain genetic traits, obvious ones like facial structure, hair color, body type. The children of famous individuals often have a hard time living up to their parent's achievements, but a lot of that is simply the typical impossibility of facing pressure of that kind directly. Yoshimi is in the unique position of doing exactly that but without the pressure. Although since most of the people she subsequently encounters knew her parents, it's simply a matter of her own necessary ignorance.
When faced with a blank slate but a given set of art supplies, there's only a matter of variance. That's the story of writing. No matter how different, every story is the same, and it's a fool's errand to try and prove differently, much less rebel and deny and reject. In Shadow Clan Yoshimi encounters James Peers, who refuses to teach her traditional martial arts methods because he believes in a holistic approach, or in other words the nurture approach by way of nature, absorbing what will develop as it's experienced, using one's own instincts to take whatever form will develop.
In adopted thought, it's simply a matter of learning. That's what education is all about in school, taking what's given you without question. In original thought, it's an interactive experience. You accept and reject and modify as you deem necessary. Truth is not always obvious, even when it seems that it is.
The natural instinct of any guardian is to assume that the person you're taking responsibility for needs your guidance. If someone like Yoshimi doesn't believe that, or fears it, then there's very little to be gained by the experience. She's an orphan because that's what she is and what she believes she must continue to be. There was always the chance that a family may have presented itself that broke all her barriers. In fact, the complete story is all about how the people she meets end up being a different kind of family. They're all struggling against each other, but the real trick is that they don't let that get in the way. That's the true definition of family.
I have a problem with people who rely on adopted thought. I think it always shows, and it's damn depressing, because they never realize it themselves. It's not always a bad thing, but it's a phenomenon that causes more trouble than it's worth. Yes, it helps everyone function in a common direction, but it's also distrustful of dissenters, and that's never a good thing. You don't always need a sword to confront it, and maybe Yoshimi's real story is that she's awash in a sea of original thinkers who are all struggling against adopted thought.
Please note that I'm not arguing against foster homes or adoption, but rather the belief that it's okay to deny the identities of those who are entered into these equations. It only ever causes trouble. That's exactly what Yoshimi believes, and most of this is merely subtext. The story of Yoshimi is a metaphor for how tough life can be in any context, no matter what you believe or what you're struggling against.
***
Please note that I'm writing about Yoshimi, as well as the Space Corps, all month long over at Scouring Monk as part of the A-to-Z Challenge.
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.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
The A-to-Z Challenge
On the off chance that I may have readers here that are not at all aware that I have another blog, I will note for the record that April is the annual blogging A-to-Z Challenge, and for my second year participating I've chosen to talk about characters and elements from both the Space Corps saga and the Yoshimi Trilogy over at Scouring Monk. This makes it a perfect opportunity to learn more about both! In addition to learning about these stories, you'll find out all kinds of things about how I write and what interests me. Today for instance you'll learn about my obsession with Caspers in Space Corps and why there's a version of the name Marty in all my books.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Jennifer Garner Changed Everything!
One of the experiences that led to Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan was a TV series called Alias.
This was a show that debuted in the fall of 2001. There's a lot that can be said about that TV season, but a girl with red hair stole a lot of my attention. At first it was just a show that everyone seemed to love. The critics couldn't stop talking about it. Eventually I gave it a shot, and watched as Gina Torres made Sydney Bristow's life a living hell. This wasn't so hard for Gina (known on Alias as Anna Espinosa, still one of the best names ever, but then Alias was filled with those), because everyone made life a living hell for Sydney. By the end of that season, Sydney's own mother joined the club!
Anyway, it wasn't just that Alias was and is still pretty unique in showing a woman doing action better than most men, and it wasn't just that Sydney was capable of expressing a wider range of emotion than anyone else on the planet (that's where my eternal love for Jennifer Garner comes into play; and p.s. if being married to an Oscar winner ever gets boring, let me know!), and it wasn't even that she did most of it wearing the most outlandish (and sometimes skimpy) disguises (hence the title) possible...It was everything. Alias was constantly inspiring. Sydney Bristow was a revelation.
My favorite season is actually everyone else's least favorite, the third, where Sydney has lost her memory and has to figure out what happened (and finally does thanks to Terry O'Quinn, in the role that basically gave us Lost's John Locke), because the world she finds when she gets it back is completely upside down! It's the season that has the least to do with the Rambaldi arc, but the most to do with Sydney herself, and for me that's about all I can ask from the series.
Alias redefined what it meant for a story to immerse itself into a character, and the fact that it was an action series meant that it was breaking every rule possible. That's the kind of TV series I tend to enjoy, and Alias was one of the first to show how far this could go, and it remains one of my favorites.
For me as a writer, I take inspiration from everything. Some writers can make it pretty obvious, and end up writing exactly like their source material, even if that means they write a story like the movies they enjoyed growing up (this is far more common than you'd think). If the writing is exceptional, if the presentation is phenomenal, I will invariably look for a way to incorporate its effect in my own work. I never consciously decided that Sydney had joined this background chorus of muses, but she was there all along. Yoshimi is not based on Sydney, but Sydney is nonetheless an ancestor to Yoshimi, whose own past is just as convoluted. If you ever watched Alias, you know exactly what I mean, and have that much better an idea what to expect as Yoshimi's story continues.
This was a show that debuted in the fall of 2001. There's a lot that can be said about that TV season, but a girl with red hair stole a lot of my attention. At first it was just a show that everyone seemed to love. The critics couldn't stop talking about it. Eventually I gave it a shot, and watched as Gina Torres made Sydney Bristow's life a living hell. This wasn't so hard for Gina (known on Alias as Anna Espinosa, still one of the best names ever, but then Alias was filled with those), because everyone made life a living hell for Sydney. By the end of that season, Sydney's own mother joined the club!
Anyway, it wasn't just that Alias was and is still pretty unique in showing a woman doing action better than most men, and it wasn't just that Sydney was capable of expressing a wider range of emotion than anyone else on the planet (that's where my eternal love for Jennifer Garner comes into play; and p.s. if being married to an Oscar winner ever gets boring, let me know!), and it wasn't even that she did most of it wearing the most outlandish (and sometimes skimpy) disguises (hence the title) possible...It was everything. Alias was constantly inspiring. Sydney Bristow was a revelation.
My favorite season is actually everyone else's least favorite, the third, where Sydney has lost her memory and has to figure out what happened (and finally does thanks to Terry O'Quinn, in the role that basically gave us Lost's John Locke), because the world she finds when she gets it back is completely upside down! It's the season that has the least to do with the Rambaldi arc, but the most to do with Sydney herself, and for me that's about all I can ask from the series.
Alias redefined what it meant for a story to immerse itself into a character, and the fact that it was an action series meant that it was breaking every rule possible. That's the kind of TV series I tend to enjoy, and Alias was one of the first to show how far this could go, and it remains one of my favorites.
For me as a writer, I take inspiration from everything. Some writers can make it pretty obvious, and end up writing exactly like their source material, even if that means they write a story like the movies they enjoyed growing up (this is far more common than you'd think). If the writing is exceptional, if the presentation is phenomenal, I will invariably look for a way to incorporate its effect in my own work. I never consciously decided that Sydney had joined this background chorus of muses, but she was there all along. Yoshimi is not based on Sydney, but Sydney is nonetheless an ancestor to Yoshimi, whose own past is just as convoluted. If you ever watched Alias, you know exactly what I mean, and have that much better an idea what to expect as Yoshimi's story continues.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan
For the past year I've been following Pat Dilloway's devotion to his Scarlet Knight series on his eponymous blog. The more I became aware that it was a series the more Pat's devotion intrigued me. At first it was just about the one book, A Hero's Journey, but then he unveiled the rest of the books, which he is currently in the midst of releasing.
Now, there are certain parallels to what I've been doing. Yes, Seven Thunders as I've been talking about it is very similar. And the book this post is about is the first of a trilogy. Yet I should note for the record that the complete Yoshimi trilogy was written well before last April, when I read Pat's blog for the first time.
Yet Pat is still something of an inspiration, and when I read A Hero's Journey for the first time, I didn't realize how closely it resembled Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan. When I read Journey earlier this year, I called it, along with Martin Ingham's Curse of Selwood, I came to see it as a kind of young adult adventure, and when I reviewed it I'm not sure I expressed that well enough. Young adult fiction is not something to feel bad about reading. Even I've struggled with this perception in the past. Most of it is inspired directly by popular fiction meant for anyone, though with themes that younger readers will appreciate. Journey in fact features a young adult of a different kind, one who's moved on from high school but in her own mind maybe doesn't feel like she has.
When I wrote about Yoshimi, I wrote very specifically for the traditional young adult market, and yet while I was editing it I was surprised to find language that was in places very similar to Pat's and even Ingham's, characterizations that resonated in exactly the way I'd planned. I tend to write very esoterically, and the whole point of Yoshimi was that she'd be my way to suppress that instinct. This works really well in Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan, though in the concluding volumes I shift a little more into more familiar territory. Which to my mind is a good thing. If you like what you see in the first book, hopefully you'll be that much more interested and invested in what follows.
Pat spends the Scarlet Knight series deepening his mythology, which is exactly what you want to see in a series. We're both budding writers looking for a way into the hearts of readers. His dedication to Scarlet Knight was one of the main reasons I was finally able to overcome the dejection of what Yoshimi's original publishing fate was supposed to be. Ingham plays a part here, too, because he released Selwood himself, the second in a series.
Yoshimi's story is all about finding a sense of forward momentum when everything seems to work against her. Her publishing history has turned out to reflect that.
You can find Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan available at Amazon as a paperback and ebook.
Monday, March 18, 2013
The Girl with the Scimitar Blade
Later this week I'll be unveiling the launch of Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan, the first of a trilogy of books I originally wrote in the fall of 2011.
Now, I know that I've been going on about Seven Thunders and the significance of the whole Space Corps saga, but in many ways I would never have finally written Seven Thunders if I hadn't written about Yoshimi.
She's the point where I finally realized that every book I've written has been a quest story. From Cloak of Shrouded Men to the two other manuscripts I have floating around, there's always been a goal the characters want to attain by the end of the story, something they hope to have achieved. Yoshimi was my way of distilling everything I'd learned into the simplest, most accessible narrative possible. As I've enjoyed saying, her story is Harry Potter crossed with Kill Bill, or maybe just what I would've done with Peter Parker if he hadn't been defined by being bitten by a radioactive spider.
Simply put, Yoshimi is an orphan, who learns that despite what she's grown up believing about herself that there is far more to her story than what the circumstances of her life have so far suggested. She learns that her parents didn't die in a car accident but were murdered.
Now, what Yoshimi actually is can sometimes be a little tricky to explain. She's a ninja warrior, I guess you could say, but she's not Bruce Lee with pigtails. She's just a fifteen year old girl who has to figure out how to navigate her new life, which is riddled with problems starting with a teenage boy named Bill (and yeah, you know exactly where the name came from), who just so happens to run the Shadow Clan, which was inspired by the man who murdered Yoshimi's parents.
Yoshimi and Bill fall in love, by the way.
And of course the story continues from there, into three additional volumes. All told the story is long enough for one average-length book, but I've split it up into three just so the beats can be better appreciated. The further she progresses the more mature she and the story becomes, and I move away from the young adult vibe to the more literary style I'm more accustomed to writing.
Yet Yoshimi's story ends up being more expansive than I originally thought. It develops its own mythology, which in writing the thing out helped me learn what it would mean to realize Seven Thunders. I'd done this before. Cloak of Shrouded Men was written over the course of three years, and there's plenty of mythology there, too, but in three sometimes very different volumes. The other manuscripts I wrote, especially Modern Ark, I juggled a lot of mythology in order to tell a story that ended up being very complicated, which was why I tried to be more simple in Minor Contracts. Yet it's with Yoshimi that I learned that complicated and simple don't have to be mutually exclusive. So that's what made Seven Thunders possible, and why I need to have Yoshimi out in the world before I can release Seven Thunders.
And by the way, there's a character named Yoshimi in Seven Thunders, who's connected to a whole legacy of her own in the Space Corps saga. It may be one indication that wherever Yoshimi's story ends in this trilogy, it could go many other places still, if readers are interested. If they aren't, then I have this one story, and I know exactly what it means.
It's a quest, and it led me to where I needed to go.
Now, I know that I've been going on about Seven Thunders and the significance of the whole Space Corps saga, but in many ways I would never have finally written Seven Thunders if I hadn't written about Yoshimi.
She's the point where I finally realized that every book I've written has been a quest story. From Cloak of Shrouded Men to the two other manuscripts I have floating around, there's always been a goal the characters want to attain by the end of the story, something they hope to have achieved. Yoshimi was my way of distilling everything I'd learned into the simplest, most accessible narrative possible. As I've enjoyed saying, her story is Harry Potter crossed with Kill Bill, or maybe just what I would've done with Peter Parker if he hadn't been defined by being bitten by a radioactive spider.
Simply put, Yoshimi is an orphan, who learns that despite what she's grown up believing about herself that there is far more to her story than what the circumstances of her life have so far suggested. She learns that her parents didn't die in a car accident but were murdered.
Now, what Yoshimi actually is can sometimes be a little tricky to explain. She's a ninja warrior, I guess you could say, but she's not Bruce Lee with pigtails. She's just a fifteen year old girl who has to figure out how to navigate her new life, which is riddled with problems starting with a teenage boy named Bill (and yeah, you know exactly where the name came from), who just so happens to run the Shadow Clan, which was inspired by the man who murdered Yoshimi's parents.
Yoshimi and Bill fall in love, by the way.
And of course the story continues from there, into three additional volumes. All told the story is long enough for one average-length book, but I've split it up into three just so the beats can be better appreciated. The further she progresses the more mature she and the story becomes, and I move away from the young adult vibe to the more literary style I'm more accustomed to writing.
Yet Yoshimi's story ends up being more expansive than I originally thought. It develops its own mythology, which in writing the thing out helped me learn what it would mean to realize Seven Thunders. I'd done this before. Cloak of Shrouded Men was written over the course of three years, and there's plenty of mythology there, too, but in three sometimes very different volumes. The other manuscripts I wrote, especially Modern Ark, I juggled a lot of mythology in order to tell a story that ended up being very complicated, which was why I tried to be more simple in Minor Contracts. Yet it's with Yoshimi that I learned that complicated and simple don't have to be mutually exclusive. So that's what made Seven Thunders possible, and why I need to have Yoshimi out in the world before I can release Seven Thunders.
And by the way, there's a character named Yoshimi in Seven Thunders, who's connected to a whole legacy of her own in the Space Corps saga. It may be one indication that wherever Yoshimi's story ends in this trilogy, it could go many other places still, if readers are interested. If they aren't, then I have this one story, and I know exactly what it means.
It's a quest, and it led me to where I needed to go.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Am I a Hobby Writer?
I have to wonder, am I a hobby writer?
Recently I went into a funk after failing to secure successful bids in a couple writing contests, one for Top Cow comics and another for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel, where I didn't make it past the first round. I've been trying to break into comics for years, and Modern Ark, the novel I submitted to Amazon's contest, has been the source of my most sustained effort to be accepted by actual publishers. Admittedly, it's an incredibly tricky book, a literary jumble really, something I was incredibly proud to write but probably looks at the very least convoluted to anyone looking for something with obviously broad appeal.
The other reason the funk happened is that I haven't written a word of my WIP since last year, and for a number of reasons, including the fact that financially I've been on a slippery slope since Borders closed in the fall of 2011, and I've been feeling panicky for months now, trying to secure a better employment position and failing miserably. That's pretty much the mode I've been in since Borders, actually, so there are bound to be moments where it feels overwhelming.
A lot of the writing I've done has been where I've been in a more secure situation. The lone exception was just after Borders closed, when I was completely unemployed for four months, and I wrote Yoshimi Trilogy. It's much more difficult, apparently, to write with what for all intents and purposes is a part-time job. Throughout 2013 so far I've been getting very few hours, which at least in theory would have been fantastic as far as using the time to finish the first draft of the WIP, but I ended up spending a lot of time job-hunting, and blogging. I love blogging, otherwise I wouldn't do it, but there are times that I wonder if it gets in my way.
That and doubts. I know I've stumbled into a community with a whole Insecure Writers thing every month, and I've never taken part in it. Sometimes it just seems as if the whole community spends all its time supporting each other, not really reading each other so much as, well, supporting each other, and it can get a little annoying. But I get my doubts, and the recent failures gave me pause. A great big pause, because I don't like failure any more than the next guy, and sometimes it seems as if failure is all I ever really experience, and I wonder, what's the point? I've now written a number of manuscripts, and last year the one book I had a contract with a publisher to have released by someone other than me ended up losing its home. Earlier this month I salvaged some of my self-esteem with the Project Mayhem anthology, and...I'm not sure, but I guess I'll just have to accept it as a personal accomplishment, because I just don't have the ability to see it go much further than that. I thought maybe the contributors would have been a little more excited about it, or have more or better connections than I do, or maybe they were all thinking the same about me. Well, unfortunately that simply isn't the case.
And so it makes me go back to something I said in a book review I did earlier this year for someone in my blogging circle. I called them a hobby writer. I'm not sure, but I think they might have taken offense to that. So what exactly is a hobby writer?
As opposed to writers who feel it in their bones, hobby writers write because they feel like it, because they always thought it was a really good idea. They have ideas, but they don't have inspiration. What I mean is they can come up with ideas. Any writer needs ideas, and obviously every writer works with ideas, the whole point of being a writer is that you feel compelled to write about your ideas. A hobby writer stops at that level. They don't particularly know or care to develop their own specific voice. They believe that their ideas are enough. It's not really about the words that shape the ideas, it's just a compulsion to write. They add to the catalog of stories but they don't necessarily add to the canon of books. Their work is disposable, essentially, something that will entertain people who exist at the time the writer is living, releasing their material, but will be forgotten utterly and completely in the years to come.
This is not about popularity. Popularity is a shifting phenomenon. Something that's wildly popular one day can and will be completely forgotten the next. Transcendent writing of any nature whether in books or songs or movies, endures, can and will be rediscovered and recognized for what it is, not the work of the writer but a story that seems to exist on its own merit. I tend to think true writers can work in this mode on a consistent basis. Hobby writers, then, are the ones who don't. They are and always will be sustained on a basis of being known as someone who writes. The others are known because of the stories they've written.
As a blogger, as someone who actively blogs about writing, I wonder if I'm a hobby writer. Do I in fact write stories that exist to say that I'm a writer or do the stories exist that reveal me as a writer? More and more I've been thinking of self-publishing as a way to conclude this once and for all. In the days and weeks and months to follow, I think I'll be self-publishing a lot more material. I'll start with Yoshimi Trilogy. I've been telling you a lot about the Space Corps saga, and that of course is the subject of the WIP I hope to finish as a draft relatively soon (I've only had a third to go since December), but Yoshimi Trilogy represents a different kind of iconic story for me, something uncomplicated, which I can release as a series.
Yes, it seemed that as soon as I released Project Mayhem I dropped off the face of the earth, certainly here on this particular blog, and now I'll be spending time here talking about a different project, then another, then another...To me, it's weird, but then I haven't spent a lot of time talking about myself as a writer, really only when I was doing NaNoWriMo circa 2004-2006. Hopefully when I'm finished, and maybe this will take all of 2013 and maybe longer, I'll have an answer to my question and maybe put it all behind me. We'll see.
Recently I went into a funk after failing to secure successful bids in a couple writing contests, one for Top Cow comics and another for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel, where I didn't make it past the first round. I've been trying to break into comics for years, and Modern Ark, the novel I submitted to Amazon's contest, has been the source of my most sustained effort to be accepted by actual publishers. Admittedly, it's an incredibly tricky book, a literary jumble really, something I was incredibly proud to write but probably looks at the very least convoluted to anyone looking for something with obviously broad appeal.
The other reason the funk happened is that I haven't written a word of my WIP since last year, and for a number of reasons, including the fact that financially I've been on a slippery slope since Borders closed in the fall of 2011, and I've been feeling panicky for months now, trying to secure a better employment position and failing miserably. That's pretty much the mode I've been in since Borders, actually, so there are bound to be moments where it feels overwhelming.
A lot of the writing I've done has been where I've been in a more secure situation. The lone exception was just after Borders closed, when I was completely unemployed for four months, and I wrote Yoshimi Trilogy. It's much more difficult, apparently, to write with what for all intents and purposes is a part-time job. Throughout 2013 so far I've been getting very few hours, which at least in theory would have been fantastic as far as using the time to finish the first draft of the WIP, but I ended up spending a lot of time job-hunting, and blogging. I love blogging, otherwise I wouldn't do it, but there are times that I wonder if it gets in my way.
That and doubts. I know I've stumbled into a community with a whole Insecure Writers thing every month, and I've never taken part in it. Sometimes it just seems as if the whole community spends all its time supporting each other, not really reading each other so much as, well, supporting each other, and it can get a little annoying. But I get my doubts, and the recent failures gave me pause. A great big pause, because I don't like failure any more than the next guy, and sometimes it seems as if failure is all I ever really experience, and I wonder, what's the point? I've now written a number of manuscripts, and last year the one book I had a contract with a publisher to have released by someone other than me ended up losing its home. Earlier this month I salvaged some of my self-esteem with the Project Mayhem anthology, and...I'm not sure, but I guess I'll just have to accept it as a personal accomplishment, because I just don't have the ability to see it go much further than that. I thought maybe the contributors would have been a little more excited about it, or have more or better connections than I do, or maybe they were all thinking the same about me. Well, unfortunately that simply isn't the case.
And so it makes me go back to something I said in a book review I did earlier this year for someone in my blogging circle. I called them a hobby writer. I'm not sure, but I think they might have taken offense to that. So what exactly is a hobby writer?
As opposed to writers who feel it in their bones, hobby writers write because they feel like it, because they always thought it was a really good idea. They have ideas, but they don't have inspiration. What I mean is they can come up with ideas. Any writer needs ideas, and obviously every writer works with ideas, the whole point of being a writer is that you feel compelled to write about your ideas. A hobby writer stops at that level. They don't particularly know or care to develop their own specific voice. They believe that their ideas are enough. It's not really about the words that shape the ideas, it's just a compulsion to write. They add to the catalog of stories but they don't necessarily add to the canon of books. Their work is disposable, essentially, something that will entertain people who exist at the time the writer is living, releasing their material, but will be forgotten utterly and completely in the years to come.
This is not about popularity. Popularity is a shifting phenomenon. Something that's wildly popular one day can and will be completely forgotten the next. Transcendent writing of any nature whether in books or songs or movies, endures, can and will be rediscovered and recognized for what it is, not the work of the writer but a story that seems to exist on its own merit. I tend to think true writers can work in this mode on a consistent basis. Hobby writers, then, are the ones who don't. They are and always will be sustained on a basis of being known as someone who writes. The others are known because of the stories they've written.
As a blogger, as someone who actively blogs about writing, I wonder if I'm a hobby writer. Do I in fact write stories that exist to say that I'm a writer or do the stories exist that reveal me as a writer? More and more I've been thinking of self-publishing as a way to conclude this once and for all. In the days and weeks and months to follow, I think I'll be self-publishing a lot more material. I'll start with Yoshimi Trilogy. I've been telling you a lot about the Space Corps saga, and that of course is the subject of the WIP I hope to finish as a draft relatively soon (I've only had a third to go since December), but Yoshimi Trilogy represents a different kind of iconic story for me, something uncomplicated, which I can release as a series.
Yes, it seemed that as soon as I released Project Mayhem I dropped off the face of the earth, certainly here on this particular blog, and now I'll be spending time here talking about a different project, then another, then another...To me, it's weird, but then I haven't spent a lot of time talking about myself as a writer, really only when I was doing NaNoWriMo circa 2004-2006. Hopefully when I'm finished, and maybe this will take all of 2013 and maybe longer, I'll have an answer to my question and maybe put it all behind me. We'll see.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
The Seven Books That Follow "Seven Thunders"
With a nod to PT Dilloway's recent Scarlet Knight timeline/outline for future volumes, I thought I'd give you a sneak at the bigger picture for my current WIP, Seven Thunders, which is part of the greater Space Corps saga, which is something I've developed for almost twenty years.
Before doing so, however, let me just put in a word or two as to why I'm finally writing Seven Thunders, after initially conceiving it in 1998, and why I feel like announcing the rest of the series. For one, I've written a number of manuscripts at this point (including Modern Ark and Minor Contracts, which I've talked a little about previously, as well as the Yoshimi trilogy, but more on that in 2013), and so have gained a certain level of confidence in my ability to write books I'm satisfied with. But I'm also beginning to see where my vision can fit in. Thanks to certain movie and television developments of the past ten years, I've been able to see past some of my original sources of inspiration, Star Trek and Star Wars. Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, for instance, or Harry Potter, even George R.R. Martin's newfound wide success thanks to Game of Thrones on HBO. These have widened the public's popular reception for science fiction and fantasy (at a certain point, Space Corps really starts to blend the two genres). It's not hard to see how the recent past has made it cool to be a geek.
Anyway, that's not really here nor there. Space Corps is my baby. I've nursed it to the point of obsession. It's time to start introducing it to the world. Seven Thunders, as I've discussed in the past, owes a great debt to the War of 1812, so it's only appropriate that I've begun to make it known in the world in 2012, the bicentennial of the conflict. It's about two brothers, however, caught in the cross-hairs of a war between civilizations. I've learned a great deal about this story I've only thought I've known as I've been writing it. There were some things about it that could only have happened once it became a reality rather than something floating around in my head (and various notes).
And yet Seven Thunders is only the beginning. One way or another, the saga will continue:
Before doing so, however, let me just put in a word or two as to why I'm finally writing Seven Thunders, after initially conceiving it in 1998, and why I feel like announcing the rest of the series. For one, I've written a number of manuscripts at this point (including Modern Ark and Minor Contracts, which I've talked a little about previously, as well as the Yoshimi trilogy, but more on that in 2013), and so have gained a certain level of confidence in my ability to write books I'm satisfied with. But I'm also beginning to see where my vision can fit in. Thanks to certain movie and television developments of the past ten years, I've been able to see past some of my original sources of inspiration, Star Trek and Star Wars. Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, for instance, or Harry Potter, even George R.R. Martin's newfound wide success thanks to Game of Thrones on HBO. These have widened the public's popular reception for science fiction and fantasy (at a certain point, Space Corps really starts to blend the two genres). It's not hard to see how the recent past has made it cool to be a geek.
Anyway, that's not really here nor there. Space Corps is my baby. I've nursed it to the point of obsession. It's time to start introducing it to the world. Seven Thunders, as I've discussed in the past, owes a great debt to the War of 1812, so it's only appropriate that I've begun to make it known in the world in 2012, the bicentennial of the conflict. It's about two brothers, however, caught in the cross-hairs of a war between civilizations. I've learned a great deal about this story I've only thought I've known as I've been writing it. There were some things about it that could only have happened once it became a reality rather than something floating around in my head (and various notes).
And yet Seven Thunders is only the beginning. One way or another, the saga will continue:
- The Dark Side of Space, which in many ways is a direct prequel to the story.
- The Fateful Lightning, which in many ways is a direct sequel.
- A Tremor of Bones, which in many ways is my favorite Space Corps story.
- The Feud We Keep With Space, which mirrors many of the elements of Seven Thunders.
- Dead Letters, which brings the timeline into entirely new territory.
- The Second Coming, which plays even wilder games with the timeline.
- The Universe and You, which is an indirect prequel to Seven Thunders.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
The Age of Convolution
We're living in a weird kind of world. I'm sure most of you know that already. Part of the benefit of enjoying the arts is getting to be entertained rather than frustrated by this.
Here I'm thinking of Oliver Stone's new movie Savages, which was released over the summer and has just come to [insert home video market of your choosing]. There're a lot of ways to view it, either as the latest of his mostly-violent-popcorn-flicks (see: Natural Born Killers, U-Turn) or as the latest of this year's mostly-violent-popcorn-flicks-by-various-directors (see: Seven Psychopaths, Killing Them Softly), or even as a new version of Traffic (which was itself based on a prior incarnation of something called...Traffic).
Savages is about the modern drug trade scene (as opposed to the '70s drug trade scene as seen in American Gangster, or the '80s scene as seen in Scarface or the '90s drug scene as seen in Trainspotting or the '00s scene as seen in...Traffic), but it's not just that (although Stone and some of his critics who've softened since some of his more polarizing efforts, which culminated in Alexander, would have you believe it's just a mostly-violent-popcorn-flick). It's about the horribly convoluted business of the drug trade, but it can also be about the horribly convoluted business of any business.
I think we're living in an age of transition. I think most people can see that, but even after the great recession begun in 2008 that exposed the horrifying number of ways that lots of businesses were doing business very badly and are still trying to get away with it today (Occupy Wall Street, which ultimately failed, was an attempt to remind everyone that we have definitely not solved those problems, although peasants have been revolting ineffectually against the system for many centuries).
The reason why I say that we're in an age of transition, which anyone can see for themselves, is that more and more the little people are attempting to exert themselves. The big people are certainly fortifying themselves, but the little people are trying to operate more and more on their own. That's what the fad of crowdsourcing is all about. It's the next iteration of all the illegal file downloading people were doing at the turn of the millennium, which caused such a revolution in the creative business model and brought us a lot of things with a small "i" at the start of it.
The short of it is that the little people are trying to get control of their own affairs. This works really well, to a certain extent. Of course, these little people realize from the start that this is only possible by building a huge network of support. This is of course what brought us the old model that got us to where we are today. The difference is that these people are theoretically learning how to do this without any one person gaining an inordinate share of the profits. It's about the work more than the money.
Basically it's the monetary system that's in a form of transition, but because there are a few people (as there has always been) who really, really believe that money is the ultimate goal of everything, this is a process that is going to take some time.
Anyway, the Age of Convolution happens when all the people scrambling to figure out their place in the new system butt heads. In a lot of ways, Breaking Bad has been demonstrating this for years, and a lot of TV viewers really enjoy it. Savages is like the movie version of Breaking Bad, if that makes it easier for you. Instead of a cancer patient looking to solve his problems by (to my mind illogically) creating bigger ones, we get two young guys making their money and also becoming involved in something far bigger than they realized.
Stone often makes movies about people falling into situations they did not expect and being swallowed whole. It's practically the only movie he makes, actually. In Savages you mostly don't have to worry about the politics. One of the young men is a former soldier, however, and so our current wars are at least name-checked (the connection between war and drugs is not made as clear as in American Gangster, but it's the same; it's worth noting that the current comic book Before Watchmen: Comedian has touched on the same subject).
The problem is that these guys can't exist in a bubble. They're closely monitored by an agent of the DEA and are actively being recruited by a Mexican drug cartel, the latter of which leads to a situation very similar to No Country for Old Men (the one actor I will reference directly is Benicio del Toro, who in this particular role is very similar to Javier Bardem, a physical presence, as del Toro always is, that haunts the movie and defines it without having to do much more than be the manifestation of the violence at the heart of the story).
What looks at the beginning of the movie like a fairly simple living arrangement for our two young guys (and their beach bunny mutual lover) quickly devolves into, yes, a convoluted affair. Not convoluted as in Stone doesn't help us figure it out, but that he lets us know all too well what's really going on.
That's what makes it topical, that's what draws me back to my point about the changing nature of the world we're living in. That's basically what's going on everywhere. Everyone's trying to get their piece of the pie and they don't really care who they step on. They're stumbling around. That's the nature of a transition period.
In a lot of ways, Stone is most closely echoing Shakespeare. I'm not calling Oliver Stone our modern William Shakespeare (that's an argument for another day), but that's exactly what Shakespeare was doing in his plays. Think about it. Romeo + Juliet is all about two families that outmaneuver themselves so cleverly, with so many convoluted things going on, that they don't realize the biggest losers are the smallest pieces on the chess board, the title characters who are just a pair of lovebirds. That's Hamlet, that's Othello (though admittedly it's Iago pulling all the strings), that's King Lear, that's Macbeth, that's every single one of them.
Shakespeare was writing at a time where England was in a marked transition thanks to Henry VIII's religious reforms, which caused a cosmic shift in the balance of society. Elizabeth I caused a lot of stabilization to occur, but she was also reigning at the start of the the exploration of the New World, and massive changes were still on their way. In each of his plays, Shakespeare writes about a paradigm shift.
Our shift is all about globalization. Some of us embrace it, some of us fear it, but it's an inescapable fact that it's happening. It's drastically affected the economics of every nation in the world, and we're still trying to figure out how to stabilize the process. It's mostly a problem of figuring out how we can begin to respect everyone and where their specific productivity exists. So much of the past was defined by physical resources, and yet now we're discovering that more and more it's the intangibles that we must depend on. Everyone knows the statistics that show how the physical resources are consumed unequally. That's what's a part of the transition, why so many people are warning of environmental catastrophe (to force those consuming more to rethink their policies).
Anyway, the convoluted nature of the world is something that's surfacing again in our fiction. Savages is one example. I'm writing about it in my writer's blog because this is exactly what I do in my fiction. I guess I tend to write stories of this nature because that's what I've known in my own life, how forces that have been building to this moment and continue to develop have affected me throughout my life. I guess I didn't really realize it until now. I'm not plugging a book. I just renamed one of my manuscripts, Finnegan. It's now going to be known as Modern Ark, for any number of reasons. That's a title I've been playing with for years. I named a poem after the term. It refers in one sense to the biblical tale of Noah's Ark, which was all about God's wrath and how a few people escaped it along with a lot of animals. I've read a number of books that reinterpreted it for modern readers (the two best being Not Wanted On the Voyage and The Preservationist). Modern Ark is not about Noah's Ark, however. It began as a vampire story. I thought it was going to stay a vampire story. I proved myself wrong fairly soon. There ended up being a lot of convoluted relationships that consumed the story, some associations that Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers comic would appreciate, characters that never meet because some of them are biblical and therefore thousands of years in the past.
Not all of my manuscripts are like Modern Ark, but it's an effort that I've tried selling to publishers with no success. I guess the recent developments concerning the fate of Yoshimi (which I'm now thinking I'll either sell around or sell myself in installments, the latter of which is similar to how Stephen King did The Green Mile and Michael Abayomi has done his science fiction epic). I'm beginning to see why it's so difficult, because not many people write like that. But there's an audience. If Oliver Stone can make Savages (and there being any number of examples of other filmmakers making similar movies, and even William frickin' Shakespeare), then I'm not so far off the mark. It's a direct reflection of the world we're living in, after all. Maybe it's not always popular to be such a direct reflection of complicated times, but that's another thing that makes the whole affair so brilliantly convoluted.
Maybe you're free of such relationships. Maybe everything runs smoothly for you. Maybe everything is simple. But I doubt that. Everything about everything is increasingly convoluted. Sometimes it's beneficial to shine a light on a giant mess. You'll see a lot of ugliness. But you'll also see beauty where you never thought it could exist before. One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. It's all a game of perspective, and that's what art at its best can give you. I like escapism as much as the next guy, but sometimes I like to have a little more.
Here I'm thinking of Oliver Stone's new movie Savages, which was released over the summer and has just come to [insert home video market of your choosing]. There're a lot of ways to view it, either as the latest of his mostly-violent-popcorn-flicks (see: Natural Born Killers, U-Turn) or as the latest of this year's mostly-violent-popcorn-flicks-by-various-directors (see: Seven Psychopaths, Killing Them Softly), or even as a new version of Traffic (which was itself based on a prior incarnation of something called...Traffic).
Savages is about the modern drug trade scene (as opposed to the '70s drug trade scene as seen in American Gangster, or the '80s scene as seen in Scarface or the '90s drug scene as seen in Trainspotting or the '00s scene as seen in...Traffic), but it's not just that (although Stone and some of his critics who've softened since some of his more polarizing efforts, which culminated in Alexander, would have you believe it's just a mostly-violent-popcorn-flick). It's about the horribly convoluted business of the drug trade, but it can also be about the horribly convoluted business of any business.
I think we're living in an age of transition. I think most people can see that, but even after the great recession begun in 2008 that exposed the horrifying number of ways that lots of businesses were doing business very badly and are still trying to get away with it today (Occupy Wall Street, which ultimately failed, was an attempt to remind everyone that we have definitely not solved those problems, although peasants have been revolting ineffectually against the system for many centuries).
The reason why I say that we're in an age of transition, which anyone can see for themselves, is that more and more the little people are attempting to exert themselves. The big people are certainly fortifying themselves, but the little people are trying to operate more and more on their own. That's what the fad of crowdsourcing is all about. It's the next iteration of all the illegal file downloading people were doing at the turn of the millennium, which caused such a revolution in the creative business model and brought us a lot of things with a small "i" at the start of it.
The short of it is that the little people are trying to get control of their own affairs. This works really well, to a certain extent. Of course, these little people realize from the start that this is only possible by building a huge network of support. This is of course what brought us the old model that got us to where we are today. The difference is that these people are theoretically learning how to do this without any one person gaining an inordinate share of the profits. It's about the work more than the money.
Basically it's the monetary system that's in a form of transition, but because there are a few people (as there has always been) who really, really believe that money is the ultimate goal of everything, this is a process that is going to take some time.
Anyway, the Age of Convolution happens when all the people scrambling to figure out their place in the new system butt heads. In a lot of ways, Breaking Bad has been demonstrating this for years, and a lot of TV viewers really enjoy it. Savages is like the movie version of Breaking Bad, if that makes it easier for you. Instead of a cancer patient looking to solve his problems by (to my mind illogically) creating bigger ones, we get two young guys making their money and also becoming involved in something far bigger than they realized.
Stone often makes movies about people falling into situations they did not expect and being swallowed whole. It's practically the only movie he makes, actually. In Savages you mostly don't have to worry about the politics. One of the young men is a former soldier, however, and so our current wars are at least name-checked (the connection between war and drugs is not made as clear as in American Gangster, but it's the same; it's worth noting that the current comic book Before Watchmen: Comedian has touched on the same subject).
The problem is that these guys can't exist in a bubble. They're closely monitored by an agent of the DEA and are actively being recruited by a Mexican drug cartel, the latter of which leads to a situation very similar to No Country for Old Men (the one actor I will reference directly is Benicio del Toro, who in this particular role is very similar to Javier Bardem, a physical presence, as del Toro always is, that haunts the movie and defines it without having to do much more than be the manifestation of the violence at the heart of the story).
What looks at the beginning of the movie like a fairly simple living arrangement for our two young guys (and their beach bunny mutual lover) quickly devolves into, yes, a convoluted affair. Not convoluted as in Stone doesn't help us figure it out, but that he lets us know all too well what's really going on.
That's what makes it topical, that's what draws me back to my point about the changing nature of the world we're living in. That's basically what's going on everywhere. Everyone's trying to get their piece of the pie and they don't really care who they step on. They're stumbling around. That's the nature of a transition period.
In a lot of ways, Stone is most closely echoing Shakespeare. I'm not calling Oliver Stone our modern William Shakespeare (that's an argument for another day), but that's exactly what Shakespeare was doing in his plays. Think about it. Romeo + Juliet is all about two families that outmaneuver themselves so cleverly, with so many convoluted things going on, that they don't realize the biggest losers are the smallest pieces on the chess board, the title characters who are just a pair of lovebirds. That's Hamlet, that's Othello (though admittedly it's Iago pulling all the strings), that's King Lear, that's Macbeth, that's every single one of them.
Shakespeare was writing at a time where England was in a marked transition thanks to Henry VIII's religious reforms, which caused a cosmic shift in the balance of society. Elizabeth I caused a lot of stabilization to occur, but she was also reigning at the start of the the exploration of the New World, and massive changes were still on their way. In each of his plays, Shakespeare writes about a paradigm shift.
Our shift is all about globalization. Some of us embrace it, some of us fear it, but it's an inescapable fact that it's happening. It's drastically affected the economics of every nation in the world, and we're still trying to figure out how to stabilize the process. It's mostly a problem of figuring out how we can begin to respect everyone and where their specific productivity exists. So much of the past was defined by physical resources, and yet now we're discovering that more and more it's the intangibles that we must depend on. Everyone knows the statistics that show how the physical resources are consumed unequally. That's what's a part of the transition, why so many people are warning of environmental catastrophe (to force those consuming more to rethink their policies).
Anyway, the convoluted nature of the world is something that's surfacing again in our fiction. Savages is one example. I'm writing about it in my writer's blog because this is exactly what I do in my fiction. I guess I tend to write stories of this nature because that's what I've known in my own life, how forces that have been building to this moment and continue to develop have affected me throughout my life. I guess I didn't really realize it until now. I'm not plugging a book. I just renamed one of my manuscripts, Finnegan. It's now going to be known as Modern Ark, for any number of reasons. That's a title I've been playing with for years. I named a poem after the term. It refers in one sense to the biblical tale of Noah's Ark, which was all about God's wrath and how a few people escaped it along with a lot of animals. I've read a number of books that reinterpreted it for modern readers (the two best being Not Wanted On the Voyage and The Preservationist). Modern Ark is not about Noah's Ark, however. It began as a vampire story. I thought it was going to stay a vampire story. I proved myself wrong fairly soon. There ended up being a lot of convoluted relationships that consumed the story, some associations that Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers comic would appreciate, characters that never meet because some of them are biblical and therefore thousands of years in the past.
Not all of my manuscripts are like Modern Ark, but it's an effort that I've tried selling to publishers with no success. I guess the recent developments concerning the fate of Yoshimi (which I'm now thinking I'll either sell around or sell myself in installments, the latter of which is similar to how Stephen King did The Green Mile and Michael Abayomi has done his science fiction epic). I'm beginning to see why it's so difficult, because not many people write like that. But there's an audience. If Oliver Stone can make Savages (and there being any number of examples of other filmmakers making similar movies, and even William frickin' Shakespeare), then I'm not so far off the mark. It's a direct reflection of the world we're living in, after all. Maybe it's not always popular to be such a direct reflection of complicated times, but that's another thing that makes the whole affair so brilliantly convoluted.
Maybe you're free of such relationships. Maybe everything runs smoothly for you. Maybe everything is simple. But I doubt that. Everything about everything is increasingly convoluted. Sometimes it's beneficial to shine a light on a giant mess. You'll see a lot of ugliness. But you'll also see beauty where you never thought it could exist before. One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. It's all a game of perspective, and that's what art at its best can give you. I like escapism as much as the next guy, but sometimes I like to have a little more.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Yoshimi...?
This week Hall Bros. Entertainment closed up shop.
This is significant news because HBE was scheduled to publish Yoshimi. It was actually scheduled to publish the book back in July, and so that's just one of the many reasons HBE no longer exists. I've got a long relationship with Hall Bros. #1, A.C. Hall. We both wrote for the comics website Paperback Reader (which also no longer exists). Ace (as I always like to call him) has a long history of writing cooperatives. At one point (after another of his ventures closed up) I decided it might be a good idea to start a literary journal with him. That was fantastic for about half a year, but that ended too. When he and his brother (naturally) opened up HBE, I finally found a home for some legitimate publishing. As one of those ever-present links on the right suggests, I got a story in their Villainy anthology that Ace chose as his editor's selection.
Yoshimi did not exist as a concept until I came up with a pitch for a book that I thought HBE might publish. Most of my fiction is incredibly cerebral. Yoshimi was my shot at doing something different. It's basically Kill Bill meets Harry Potter. I wrote the majority of the book during an extended period of unemployment. It's safe to say that if I didn't have that book to work on at that time, I might have gone crazy. I turned in the manuscript to HBE and started the waiting process.
The waiting process turned out to be a waiting process. I guess this sort of thing happens all the time, at least as far as small presses go, delays in the schedule. Except this was no delay. This was a slow march to oblivion.
I'm sad at HBE's fate for a number of reasons, but chief among them is the contract that is now no longer exists. Yoshimi was going to be my first legitimately published book. No matter the book sales, this would have been a huge step for me. My blogging friends seem to have a lot of this in the bag already. I've been working at maybe possibly theoretically being a full-time writer for years now. It was my stated goal on graduating from college ten years ago. I had no idea how to accomplish that goal, however. Cerebral fiction does not sell well. Publishers damn sure aren't interested in it. Readers? I have no idea. I've never gotten the chance to find out.
I've self-published a few books (actually, Monorama the Kindle Edition was free on Wednesday and I completely forgot to mention it), but I don't have the resources to truly promote that stuff. Some writers have the ability to sell themselves. Some writers, like me, simply hope the work will sell itself. They believe that this is the way writing should go. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who want to sell books, but preferably their own, which makes it very hard for the people who want to sell other people's books to make decisions on who to select for that honor.
I had HBE. Emphasis on "had." I suppose the fact that I deliberately shaped Yoshimi to be anything but what I normally write might make it easier to find another publisher. And maybe I simply haven't been as aggressive in my search for publishers to begin with. Some writers can deal with rejection. Some of us really hate form responses (or no response at all). Some of us find that downright insulting (and unprofessional).
Anyway, this is just to say. My life as a writer, as many writers can say, is not an easy one. Thanks for being there, Ace. Maybe we can try and do business again some time. Although you'll forgive me if I approach the next opportunity more cautiously.
This is significant news because HBE was scheduled to publish Yoshimi. It was actually scheduled to publish the book back in July, and so that's just one of the many reasons HBE no longer exists. I've got a long relationship with Hall Bros. #1, A.C. Hall. We both wrote for the comics website Paperback Reader (which also no longer exists). Ace (as I always like to call him) has a long history of writing cooperatives. At one point (after another of his ventures closed up) I decided it might be a good idea to start a literary journal with him. That was fantastic for about half a year, but that ended too. When he and his brother (naturally) opened up HBE, I finally found a home for some legitimate publishing. As one of those ever-present links on the right suggests, I got a story in their Villainy anthology that Ace chose as his editor's selection.
Yoshimi did not exist as a concept until I came up with a pitch for a book that I thought HBE might publish. Most of my fiction is incredibly cerebral. Yoshimi was my shot at doing something different. It's basically Kill Bill meets Harry Potter. I wrote the majority of the book during an extended period of unemployment. It's safe to say that if I didn't have that book to work on at that time, I might have gone crazy. I turned in the manuscript to HBE and started the waiting process.
The waiting process turned out to be a waiting process. I guess this sort of thing happens all the time, at least as far as small presses go, delays in the schedule. Except this was no delay. This was a slow march to oblivion.
I'm sad at HBE's fate for a number of reasons, but chief among them is the contract that is now no longer exists. Yoshimi was going to be my first legitimately published book. No matter the book sales, this would have been a huge step for me. My blogging friends seem to have a lot of this in the bag already. I've been working at maybe possibly theoretically being a full-time writer for years now. It was my stated goal on graduating from college ten years ago. I had no idea how to accomplish that goal, however. Cerebral fiction does not sell well. Publishers damn sure aren't interested in it. Readers? I have no idea. I've never gotten the chance to find out.
I've self-published a few books (actually, Monorama the Kindle Edition was free on Wednesday and I completely forgot to mention it), but I don't have the resources to truly promote that stuff. Some writers have the ability to sell themselves. Some writers, like me, simply hope the work will sell itself. They believe that this is the way writing should go. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who want to sell books, but preferably their own, which makes it very hard for the people who want to sell other people's books to make decisions on who to select for that honor.
I had HBE. Emphasis on "had." I suppose the fact that I deliberately shaped Yoshimi to be anything but what I normally write might make it easier to find another publisher. And maybe I simply haven't been as aggressive in my search for publishers to begin with. Some writers can deal with rejection. Some of us really hate form responses (or no response at all). Some of us find that downright insulting (and unprofessional).
Anyway, this is just to say. My life as a writer, as many writers can say, is not an easy one. Thanks for being there, Ace. Maybe we can try and do business again some time. Although you'll forgive me if I approach the next opportunity more cautiously.
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.
Monday, October 1, 2012
The Revolution Will Be Televised
One of the new shows I'm watching this fall TV season is Revolution, which posits a future where technology has been rendered worthless by the nullification of electricity. Some commentators have suggested that it's a little silly to suggest that 1) electricity can be blocked like that and 2) people won't be able to work around that without going medieval.
For one thing, it's not uncommon for apocalyptic visions to view people having a hard time getting technology back up and running even when electricity hasn't been tampered with (see: The Stand). For another, if society went to heck in a hand basket, who do you think would have a better chance of surviving the initial chaos, the big surly bullies or the puny little science geeks? This week's episode had an anecdote about that very scenario, by the way.
Considering that the purpose of this update has nothing to do with Revolution, there's very little point in continuing to talk about it except to note that failure of the imagination can be catching. As a writer, I come across this more often than I expect, in more ways than I'd like. The world can be and in fact is very screwy like that.
If you'll recall, I put myself on a schedule for the end of September, hoping to round up some lingering projects before finally tackling a book I've been meaning to write since 1998. I finished up "City of Tomorrow" at Sigild V as planned. Tweeting a few of the chapters got me more readership than usual, so that was nice. Overall, I think it was a more rewarding writing experience than other serialized stories I've blogged, because although I plotted the story, I let most of it develop as I wrote it. That's nearly the opposite of what I hope to accomplish in the next three months as I write Seven Thunders. Today I wrote the 5,000 word prologue (every chapter will be that length, half of what I eventually mastered writing in single-day marathons last year working on Yoshimi). As I've mentioned, this is a story I've been developing for some time now, but even in recent weeks I've discovered new things that needed to be incorporated. So although most of it is indeed planned out, I expect to have a few more surprises yet.
That's something of what's happened with my Top Cow/Ji Xi script sample. I've known for weeks what I expected to do with it, but the original plan to have it written by yesterday didn't happen. I wrote the captions today, however, as I continued to warm up for writing another book. I only have dialogue and panel descriptions to go! Normally I write all of that at once, but this is my second chance with a Top Cow talent search, and I don't want to foul it up again. During my Digital Webbing days, I think I was more confident about my comic scripting abilities (this was several years after losing the first Top Cow contest), and I've been out of practice for a while. I wrote two biography scripts for Bluewater early in the years, but there's been little word on progress in turning them into actual comics, and a graphic novel with an honest-to-god collaborator is still getting its sample pages illustrated. (I know how this sounds like I'm almost a glimmer of a big shot! But I don't feel like one, so don't worry about it.) As I've mentioned, there's more Bluewater work I may hit this month in a Dr. Seuss biography, which I plan to do in Dr. Seuss style. (But I've been dallying so long on that one, will someone else have been given this theoretical book?)
Anyway, the most important bit to take away from this is my excitement over finally beginning to write Seven Thunders!
For one thing, it's not uncommon for apocalyptic visions to view people having a hard time getting technology back up and running even when electricity hasn't been tampered with (see: The Stand). For another, if society went to heck in a hand basket, who do you think would have a better chance of surviving the initial chaos, the big surly bullies or the puny little science geeks? This week's episode had an anecdote about that very scenario, by the way.
Considering that the purpose of this update has nothing to do with Revolution, there's very little point in continuing to talk about it except to note that failure of the imagination can be catching. As a writer, I come across this more often than I expect, in more ways than I'd like. The world can be and in fact is very screwy like that.
If you'll recall, I put myself on a schedule for the end of September, hoping to round up some lingering projects before finally tackling a book I've been meaning to write since 1998. I finished up "City of Tomorrow" at Sigild V as planned. Tweeting a few of the chapters got me more readership than usual, so that was nice. Overall, I think it was a more rewarding writing experience than other serialized stories I've blogged, because although I plotted the story, I let most of it develop as I wrote it. That's nearly the opposite of what I hope to accomplish in the next three months as I write Seven Thunders. Today I wrote the 5,000 word prologue (every chapter will be that length, half of what I eventually mastered writing in single-day marathons last year working on Yoshimi). As I've mentioned, this is a story I've been developing for some time now, but even in recent weeks I've discovered new things that needed to be incorporated. So although most of it is indeed planned out, I expect to have a few more surprises yet.
That's something of what's happened with my Top Cow/Ji Xi script sample. I've known for weeks what I expected to do with it, but the original plan to have it written by yesterday didn't happen. I wrote the captions today, however, as I continued to warm up for writing another book. I only have dialogue and panel descriptions to go! Normally I write all of that at once, but this is my second chance with a Top Cow talent search, and I don't want to foul it up again. During my Digital Webbing days, I think I was more confident about my comic scripting abilities (this was several years after losing the first Top Cow contest), and I've been out of practice for a while. I wrote two biography scripts for Bluewater early in the years, but there's been little word on progress in turning them into actual comics, and a graphic novel with an honest-to-god collaborator is still getting its sample pages illustrated. (I know how this sounds like I'm almost a glimmer of a big shot! But I don't feel like one, so don't worry about it.) As I've mentioned, there's more Bluewater work I may hit this month in a Dr. Seuss biography, which I plan to do in Dr. Seuss style. (But I've been dallying so long on that one, will someone else have been given this theoretical book?)
Anyway, the most important bit to take away from this is my excitement over finally beginning to write Seven Thunders!
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...
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Shootout...
The third round of the Shootout determined the three finalists by determining those with the highest scores in each of the three groups. That means that as of today, I'm officially done with the Shootout, at least as far as writing. There's still deciding a winner, which all participants get to vote on when the final prompt delivers the final stories.
Martin Ingham is using the final round to select at least one story for inclusion in a forthcoming Hall Bros Entertainment anthology. I've had a mixed history with HBE anthologies. I worked with A.C. Hall (one of the, ah, Hall brothers) on a literary journal that kind of fell apart some five years ago, and so I've been in contact with him since that time (aside from the fact that we met writing for a now-defunct comic book website), and he's humored me quite a lot, publishing one effort as an editor's selection in Villainy, but turning down half a dozen others, which may or may not include the one that was still sitting on the table when their most recent anthology was cancelled.
(Martin's announcement for his anthology can be found here, by the way.)
HBE is currently trying to catch up on things, including my manuscript for Yoshimi, which I'm petrified will either be rejected or become a victim of an implosion. I suck at networking. The participants in the Shootout will probably suggest that I don't play well with others, too, and readers of this blog may know a few reasons why. I have certain expectations for the things I read. I don't just want a story that's technically readable. I don't just want reasonable grammar. I want something that feels like it should have been written, by someone who feels like they should be writing. It's always a little odd to suggest that some people shouldn't be writing, because there are so many people who call themselves writers, and if I say that some people really shouldn't be writing, it may come off as frustration that I have to compete so fiercely to be heard.
People say that adversity is good for character. I mean to suggest that people only say that because for most people, competition is inevitable. Some people get lucky breaks, know the right people (which admittedly is exactly how Yoshimi was first breached with HBE), seem to have no trouble at all in finding success. Others never do, or at least find it after many frustrating years and advice that suggests if they just do it this way they can't help but succeed! And suggestions for improvement are always welcome, but you must understand that what worked for you won't always work for everyone else.
In sum, it sucks to be human.
There is no one surefire path to success. Everything that happens is basically a fluke anyway. Even if you believe in an intelligent creator, the tenets of free will suggest that even if someone knows everything that will ever happen, it all happens because of the actions of an individual. And the sad part is, nothing is truly in anyone's control. The illusion of control (something cleverly demonstrated in the movie Instinct, which I try to support whenever possible) is humanity's greatest folly, something just about everyone seems perfectly happy to ignore, and suggest that it can be overcome. Well, it can't. Suck on that for a moment.
The Shootout basically sucked, by the way. I appreciate that my stories weren't perfect. My scores were equally imperfect. They seemed downright insensible. The people who read my stories used a different kind of logic than I did. Now, I know this is at least partially true, because across the board those who referenced overall quality of writing said mine was high. They just kept saying that they wished it had been longer. Structurally, the second piece improved on the first, and the third on the second. I wrote longer and tried to be clearer, while attempting to preserve my original intentions. I didn't write any of the stories in a way to invoke absolute control. The second story ended in a huge twist nobody really got. The third was a total play on Dan Brown style thrillers. By that point, I really thought if I just had a little fun, the reader would get that. I went back and edited to try and make it obvious enough without outright spelling everything out, just to preserve the playfulness, and still people came back saying that they wanted longer, they wanted more; they wanted a roadmap, basically.
Participants had a hard time with my approach. Many of them seemed to be writers who knew exactly what they expected to expect, which was what they believed to be fairly routine short stories, which of course were generally much longer than mine and very much structurally different. The sad part is I truly tried to conform more than I usually do, writing a lot more visually, for instance, while still trying to keep the focus on the particular perspective of the characters. In the third story, as I said I tried to be playful with that, and the readers really hated that. They didn't get it at all. When I didn't get a story, I at least explained why I didn't get it, why I couldn't get into it, but my readers simply said they wanted something other than what I had written. That's not the point. I'm not even forcing any of them to read a long story, which most of the participants did, so it's not like if they felt tortured they were tortured for long. It's just, they had different expectations.
Some participants simply felt entitled, and the whole framework helped them. For this reason, I believe another Shootout simply isn't in the making for me. The same is true of WRiTE CLUB. In this one, there's just too many participants. It's completely unwieldy. DL Hammons has all but admitted this, first by his comments this past Wednesday that he regrets being completely lost as host to the contest, and by not even posting a round on Friday. Part of him is doing this to get attention. Part of him is doing it to support others. None of him seems to have taken into account that he's asking far more of the exercise than it's capable of accomplishing. The range of the writing quality is astounding, as I've said, and nearly every vote is cast basically ignoring this, telling me that most of the participants are about as far from honest as possible.
As someone who's trying to figure out what it means to be in a community of writers, none of this is what I would have expected or hoped to find. Like every English Major, I went through school believing that writing circles are made up of incredible talent, raising each other up and becoming a movement with its own chapter in literary history and a name that is as famous as the individual members. The reality, in the 21st century, is that such communities only exist now to support a bunch of amateur writers who hide rather than expose the faults they find in each other's writing. They're not pushing for excellence, but rather for exposure. In my book (clearly a work of fiction), excellence breeds exposure.
Maybe I ought simply to emigrate to some other country. American is full of itself. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but we're headed very clearly toward the Roman Empire, not because of inept politicians, but because the citizens have no concept of perspective. I'd think writers of all people would. But the increasing truth of American writers is, they don't.
Martin Ingham is using the final round to select at least one story for inclusion in a forthcoming Hall Bros Entertainment anthology. I've had a mixed history with HBE anthologies. I worked with A.C. Hall (one of the, ah, Hall brothers) on a literary journal that kind of fell apart some five years ago, and so I've been in contact with him since that time (aside from the fact that we met writing for a now-defunct comic book website), and he's humored me quite a lot, publishing one effort as an editor's selection in Villainy, but turning down half a dozen others, which may or may not include the one that was still sitting on the table when their most recent anthology was cancelled.
(Martin's announcement for his anthology can be found here, by the way.)
HBE is currently trying to catch up on things, including my manuscript for Yoshimi, which I'm petrified will either be rejected or become a victim of an implosion. I suck at networking. The participants in the Shootout will probably suggest that I don't play well with others, too, and readers of this blog may know a few reasons why. I have certain expectations for the things I read. I don't just want a story that's technically readable. I don't just want reasonable grammar. I want something that feels like it should have been written, by someone who feels like they should be writing. It's always a little odd to suggest that some people shouldn't be writing, because there are so many people who call themselves writers, and if I say that some people really shouldn't be writing, it may come off as frustration that I have to compete so fiercely to be heard.
People say that adversity is good for character. I mean to suggest that people only say that because for most people, competition is inevitable. Some people get lucky breaks, know the right people (which admittedly is exactly how Yoshimi was first breached with HBE), seem to have no trouble at all in finding success. Others never do, or at least find it after many frustrating years and advice that suggests if they just do it this way they can't help but succeed! And suggestions for improvement are always welcome, but you must understand that what worked for you won't always work for everyone else.
In sum, it sucks to be human.
There is no one surefire path to success. Everything that happens is basically a fluke anyway. Even if you believe in an intelligent creator, the tenets of free will suggest that even if someone knows everything that will ever happen, it all happens because of the actions of an individual. And the sad part is, nothing is truly in anyone's control. The illusion of control (something cleverly demonstrated in the movie Instinct, which I try to support whenever possible) is humanity's greatest folly, something just about everyone seems perfectly happy to ignore, and suggest that it can be overcome. Well, it can't. Suck on that for a moment.
The Shootout basically sucked, by the way. I appreciate that my stories weren't perfect. My scores were equally imperfect. They seemed downright insensible. The people who read my stories used a different kind of logic than I did. Now, I know this is at least partially true, because across the board those who referenced overall quality of writing said mine was high. They just kept saying that they wished it had been longer. Structurally, the second piece improved on the first, and the third on the second. I wrote longer and tried to be clearer, while attempting to preserve my original intentions. I didn't write any of the stories in a way to invoke absolute control. The second story ended in a huge twist nobody really got. The third was a total play on Dan Brown style thrillers. By that point, I really thought if I just had a little fun, the reader would get that. I went back and edited to try and make it obvious enough without outright spelling everything out, just to preserve the playfulness, and still people came back saying that they wanted longer, they wanted more; they wanted a roadmap, basically.
Participants had a hard time with my approach. Many of them seemed to be writers who knew exactly what they expected to expect, which was what they believed to be fairly routine short stories, which of course were generally much longer than mine and very much structurally different. The sad part is I truly tried to conform more than I usually do, writing a lot more visually, for instance, while still trying to keep the focus on the particular perspective of the characters. In the third story, as I said I tried to be playful with that, and the readers really hated that. They didn't get it at all. When I didn't get a story, I at least explained why I didn't get it, why I couldn't get into it, but my readers simply said they wanted something other than what I had written. That's not the point. I'm not even forcing any of them to read a long story, which most of the participants did, so it's not like if they felt tortured they were tortured for long. It's just, they had different expectations.
Some participants simply felt entitled, and the whole framework helped them. For this reason, I believe another Shootout simply isn't in the making for me. The same is true of WRiTE CLUB. In this one, there's just too many participants. It's completely unwieldy. DL Hammons has all but admitted this, first by his comments this past Wednesday that he regrets being completely lost as host to the contest, and by not even posting a round on Friday. Part of him is doing this to get attention. Part of him is doing it to support others. None of him seems to have taken into account that he's asking far more of the exercise than it's capable of accomplishing. The range of the writing quality is astounding, as I've said, and nearly every vote is cast basically ignoring this, telling me that most of the participants are about as far from honest as possible.
As someone who's trying to figure out what it means to be in a community of writers, none of this is what I would have expected or hoped to find. Like every English Major, I went through school believing that writing circles are made up of incredible talent, raising each other up and becoming a movement with its own chapter in literary history and a name that is as famous as the individual members. The reality, in the 21st century, is that such communities only exist now to support a bunch of amateur writers who hide rather than expose the faults they find in each other's writing. They're not pushing for excellence, but rather for exposure. In my book (clearly a work of fiction), excellence breeds exposure.
Maybe I ought simply to emigrate to some other country. American is full of itself. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but we're headed very clearly toward the Roman Empire, not because of inept politicians, but because the citizens have no concept of perspective. I'd think writers of all people would. But the increasing truth of American writers is, they don't.
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