IWSG December 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group released the book it had members help create.  You can read about that here.

I'll use this meeting to wrap-up my year in writing.  Technically I made horrendous progress in my attempt to make people pay me for writing.  I sold virtually no books and publishers were as usual completely uninterested in me and my inadequate attempts to convince them to think otherwise.  I released a book in February and the one person who read it hated it.  I mean hated it.  Can I emphasize that any more?  Hated it!!!

So, as far as my ego went in 2014, it probably has a number of bruises still looking to heal up.

But the thing is, I think this was an incredibly crucial year.  I worked on a number of projects and had some breakthroughs that could very well lead to that golden future I aspire to.  Yay me and all that.  I'm not even just about talking my fiction.  One of the biggest projects of several big projects I tackled this year came at the very start, something I finished after starting a year ago this month, a complete Bible commentary, something I hadn't even intended to do when I decided to finally read the Bible all the way through for the first time.  I'm thinking of releasing that as a book.  If any significant readership materialized for it, I'd probably have to talk myself out of a lot of controversy, but I'm okay with that.  I more than okay.  I'm at a point in my life where I need to start asserting myself.

The Star Wars project was a personal triumph and came with great creative fulfillment, and that's as much as any writer should ever really hope to expect.  I think the more I pushed to finish it before the end of the year the harder I made it for the few readers who cared to continue doing so.  That's okay.  The "comic strip" I'm wrapping up soon went the same way.  Early in the year I had a wealth of support, but it vanished the longer it went on.  But for me, it represents closure, having finally figured out the full shape of a story I've been trying to tell since high school.

I finished writing a very long novel in the early months, and then tackled the start of a very short one in the closing ones.  (Maybe I'll still finish the draft of that one before the end of the year.  It doesn't matter.  Circumstances I won't discuss here drastically affected the shape of the whole year, and my ability to continue writing as I normally would.)

And various insights on old projects as well the conceiving of new projects entirely.

But I should stress that 2014 also walloped me good!  One anthology that would've been the culmination of a writing group filled with people I knew in another lifetime vanished.  Another seems destined, officially, to go nowhere.  The last of three comic book biography scripts has been spinning wheels looking an artist for more than a year now.  I failed completely in a writing contest, not even being selected to enter the voting rounds.  And I know with absolute certainty that if I expect anyone to randomly find my books on their own, much less like them, I can probably sell myself a bridge, too (but don't worry, it's a nice one with historic value and a whole ode dedicated to it by the poet Hart Crane).

Maybe next year I'll have better things to report...

Okay, so the 18,000-words-in-a-day thing is not gonna happen...

I just wrote 12,000 words, the first section of my new WIP, The Pond War, what was supposed to be the grand unofficial NaNoWriMo project where I was gonna burn through the process quicker, relatively, than ever before.

But things change, and I'm happy with that.  I tried writing the beginning of Pond War a few weeks back, and it wasn't feeling right.  I stepped back.  I didn't mean to stand back this far, but it ended up being the right thing.  I found out what was supposed to happen in the story, everything I was wrong about.  These things happen.

I renamed another of my manuscripts during this process.  I've never renamed so many stories as all the manuscripts I've written over the last few years.  What I published as Pale Moonlight earlier this year had a few different names before that, and I was convinced each time I had nailed it.  Holy Men is now known as Metatron, a fundamental shift that also led to some changes within the manuscript itself.  I'm hardly impartial in such matters, but I think that's only made that one stronger.  Pond War is itself not even this WIP's original title.

I've even revised my end wordcount goal, downward.  I did some research and discovered 90,000 is wildly unreasonable for the age group I'm theoretically targeting.  It works.  Maybe I'm getting lazy, but I'd be happy with 50,000, which at least means that if I'm able to unofficially win NaNo again, I'll be done the first draft entirely by the end of the month.  I can be very happy with that.

We'll see.

(Edited to reflect more accurate word totals.)

IWSG November 2014: My Insane NaNoWriMo Approach This Year!

For this month's Insecure Writers Support Group post, like more than a few others I'm actually going to discuss NaNoWriMo a little.

National Novel Writing Month is the insane time of the year when you get to learn exactly what kind of writer you really are by powering through 50,000 words in a thirty-day span.  This was something I officially tackled in 2004-2006, which led to The Cloak of Shrouded Men, my first book , and unofficially been completing while writing various other books starting in 2009, including last year when I started on In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote about here at the time and apparently that helped inspire Michael Abayomi this year, which is pretty cool.

This year I'm being totally insane.  Back in 2011 I managed to write chapters of The Whole Bloody Affair (also known as the Yoshimi Trilogy) in 10,000-word increments.  The idea, if it is at all possible in reality, is to try and nearly double that, with 18,000 words with each chapter as I tackle The Pond War, my War of 1812 tale that's a mash-up with the Tim Laflamme character originally introduced in Land of Pangaea.  It's my bid at Alice in Wonderland and every other story like it (Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, etc. etc. etc.), except the fantasy will actually be in the real world and brutal reality through the door to the other side.

Why am I writing, or attempting to write so many words each day?  Because I figured out I could when I needed to write a lot of words last year.  Whole Bloody Affair was training ground.  The more experience I have writing, the more I'm aware of what I'm comfortable writing, and Pond War is something I've been developing, or in other words thinking about, for much of this year.  I'm feeling confident.  Ridiculously overconfident?

We'll see!

The end of the Star Wars Variations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers ought to like challenges.

IWSG October 2014

It's the one-year anniversary of the Insecure Writers Support Group website, and to celebrate the fine folks behind it are putting together a helpful anthology with contributions from members.  We have a choice between three topics: writing, publishing, and marketing.  They're asking that we provide in this month's post our contribution, which topic we've chosen, a title, a bio, and whether or not we give permission to use it.  So:

title: "Woes of the English Bachelor"
topic: publishing
bio: The author has published such books as The Cloak of Shrouded Men, The Whole Bloody Affair, and Pale Moonlight, and can be found blogging at the eponymous Tony Laplume.
permission: yes

There's a subset of would-be world famous writers who had the misfortune of attending college and subsequently becoming English Bachelors.  Now, it's important to note that English Bachelors are not by definition single and alone and did-I-mention-alone, but as far as I can tell from my own experience, this seems to be their natural state.  It's a byproduct of their tendency to read and write and did-I-mention-read-and-write during the hours of the day when they are not sleeping or eating (although skillful English Bachelors can combine sleeping and eating with reading and/or writing with little effort), and when not reading and writing trying to spend the rest of that time in activities that will directly promote these efforts.

When they have done enough reading and writing they have the curious tendency to seek the status of Being Published.  Being Published is a byproduct of having spent their entire lives reading and writing, more natural than even sleeping and eating.  When they discover that the real world is not like the Cozy Cocoon of College (that is also, I might add, located adjacent to the alliterative-friendly Crazy Town) and there are not teems of hapless individuals forced to read and/or publish them, they have two choices: and I don't remember what those are, because I am an English Bachelor, and I've discovered that after the Cozy Cocoon of College, I in fact only had one option after leaving it, which is Crazy Town.

The end result is that they become Insecure Writers, and the byproduct of being an Insecure Writer is finding increasingly orthodox ways of getting published, but not necessarily read, anyway.  These English Bachelors are typically Insecure Writers because they learned all the ways to write that no one outside of their subset actually wants to read.

Finding the story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever realized that about something you were working on?

IWSG September 2014

It's time once again for everyone to climb about the IWSG ship!  (I doubt anyone will get the reference.  It is probably better that way.)  Click the link this month, because there is exciting Insect Wings Swooping Gracefully information.

I'm sorry, I've just been informed that I've been meeting with the wrong group.  Alas, I will continue all the same!

When I was writing about fan fiction in my last post (not my last Insect Wings post, but the last one I wrote here in general), I kind of glossed over a crucial thing I realized recently:

But before I actually finish that thought, let's rewind a little!

Pocket Books has been publishing Star Trek fiction for years.  At the turn of the millennium it decided to let fans get in on the action with a series of annual Strange New Worlds contests.  I decided I'd like to get in on the action.  Prior to my initial attempt, I'd never written a story outside of a class assignment.  I didn't end up being selected that first year.  I didn't end up being selected the next three times, either (I don't remember if I actually submitted the last one, but go with me anyway).  The second effort remains the most personal of the early stories I wrote.  I'd just begun college, and this was the first time I'd been away from home for an extended period.  I ended up writing about my own experiences about returning home for the first time, using Jake Sisko as a surrogate.  I have no idea if the resulting story was any better than the first effort.  I know my third entry was written very esoterically, and that alone was probably enough to have made it another easy failure, but writing that one helped move me along creatively, and I suppose that was the best I could have gotten from the experience, all considered.

Long story short, I've realized, finally, that these early publishing failures were probably deserved.  The time I lost a chance to write for Top Cow comics (another contest) was probably deserved, too, even though it was another useful learning/creative development experience.  Heck, I would never have learned about Double Steak Day, if I'd won that one.

We tend to consider failures to be, well, failures, and deservedly so, but sometimes (hopefully always) we can take positive things away from them, and maybe even, in time, realize we actually...deserved to fail.  It sucks, but we can't always win.  *cough* Red Sox *cough*  Yeah.  Doesn't mean we always deserve to fail, either.  Sometimes there's just no accounting, except to realize there are a ton of people trying to accomplish the same exact goals, and I guess that idea of being prepared really is relevant to the outcome.  All you can do is try and be the Best Possible You at any given moment.  Maybe that BPY isn't always impressive, even to yourself, but sometimes it really is about the effort.  It's not always what others think of you, but what you think of yourself.  This is not selfish thinking.  An honest person should always be comfortable with themselves, even when rough patches hit.  Trust yourself.  Believe in yourself.  There's always next time.  And in the meantime, enjoy what you're doing.  Do your best.  Strive to improve.  Move along.