Seven Facts About Seven Thunders

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

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

   

   via Movie Mail

IWSG July 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group meets on the first Wednesday of every month (except that one).

The book I've been reading, an advance copy of Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves, has gotten me thinking about the Great American Novel.  I wonder how many writers even still think about such a thing.  I've been trying to figure out why Thomas's book has such incredible hype surrounding it, because it's really not very good, and the only thing I can figure is, because writers in general don't really think about the Great American Novel anymore.

We've become a niche generation.  A hundred years ago this would have been unthinkable.  Of course, a hundred years ago writers were busy laying the foundation for exactly what we've become, but they approached it differently.  They approached the idea of genre as a lens by which to view the real world.  I think we cracked that lens a long time ago.  I think we have no concept that the lens ever existed at all.

So we have generations of writers, especially the current one, where all they think about is storytelling that has no real interest in talking about things that matter.  When someone like Thomas comes along, a new voice (because so many of our esteemed writers are old voices), and he tackles the real world, the literary community gets carried away with itself.  I think that explains Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, too.  Because that's not a very good book, either.  It's the same thing the Academy Awards try to do every year when they award Best Picture, find the movie that speaks to what we're thinking of ourselves now, a commentary that defines our times.

In other words, the whole idea of the Great American Novel.  The idea that we can reach beyond ourselves, our own petty interests, and be expansive, be grand, be great.  Not just write for the sake of writing, but try and say something, express something.

I've stumbled around with this in my own writing.  Pale Moonlight was my first real attempt to tackle it, and so I guess that's another reason I'm especially sensitive about it.  When I wrote In the Land of Pangaea, I embraced the challenge a little more directly.  Some of the projects I have lined up will try to be even more direct about it.

I have no idea what the Great American Novel actually is.  I think it's an ideal, one we hardly recognize even when it happens.  Something like We Are Not Ourselves comes along, and critics fall all over themselves to embrace it, laud it, exaggerate its worth.  Because it's one of the central conceits of being an American, that at our best we write the best.  But it seldom seems to actually happen.

Just something to consider.

On the Docket 2014

• Holy Men - Another manuscript that has undergone a number of different titles.  This is my Adam/Eve/Cain/Abel story and was originally started Fall 2010.  I've been contemplating self-publishing it in the near future.
• Book of Doom - A project cobbled together from story fragments I've had for years, including "Tug Rushmore," the book I wanted to write after graduating college.  Was one of two books I considered making my Fall 2014 manuscript.
• Space Corps Book 2: The Dark Riders - This is the second.  The first book in this series, Seven Thunders, was the manuscript I started Fall 2012.  Dark Riders and Book 3, The Fateful Lightning, are the two oldest outlined concepts in the Space Corps saga, while Seven Thunders was always the showcase centerpiece (and is my latest attempt to win the interest of an actual publisher).  Recently I've been revisiting Riders and Lightning, looking for ways to not only improve them but also make them more similar to what Thunders ultimately became.  That's resulted in somewhat radical character revisions for at least three characters (probably four) though not necessarily anything different in their arcs.  (Context is everything.)
• In the Land of Pangaea - The Fall 2013 manuscript is sitting in a drawer.  Not figuratively, as most of my manuscripts do, but in an actual drawer because at the moment it exists only in a single print copy that I sometimes dread WILL BE LOST TO AN INEXPLICABLE AND PROBABLY NOT LIKELY (???) DISASTER.  When will this one move forward?  It's anyone's guess (although somewhere within the 21st century would be a better one than others you might suggest).
• Song Remains the Same - This is something that kind of became a spin-off of Pangaea, specifically the last section (the blatantly autobiographical one).  Features the same set of characters in different permutations and interpretations.  I stopped writing this one about 60% into it, and I kept expecting to continue at some point, but at a certain point, I realized it was actually a good thing to stop when I did.
• 101 Star Wars Variations - Pretty much the same as the above, but with Star Wars characters instead.  I sketched out the complete list at the start of the year, and hope to have them all written by the end of the year.  If I'd written a mere two a week from the start, I'd be in pretty good shape right now, but I didn't, and so I'll be playing catch-up (although I'm too lazy to do the math, I won't really know or care when I don't have to anymore).  So far this has been great fun.
• Belle York - This is the Fall 2014 manuscript.  It's an idea my sister gave me.  She's long been a Beauty and the Beast fan, and so it seems natural that her idea was for me to write my version of the story.  The ideas started flooding, and so I was able to fashion it pretty quickly into my own idea.  Like Seven Thunders it's going to return to the War of 1812.  I'll likely be writing more about this one in the months ahead.
• Foundlings - This is another book I will work on at some point, my version of the JFK/LHO story (if you don't know one of those acronyms off-hand, you certainly know the other).
• Zooropa - An actual book that brings together a number of disparate concepts (a lot like Book of Doom) that I've been serializing in crude comic strip form all year long, which thanks to having a (series of) notebook(s) where I record all my ideas, I was recently reminded that the conclusion I'd formulated for the comic strips is not the actual ending.  I sometimes dabble in comic writing.  This will hopefully be my first comic novel, which will not completely shame the late Douglas Adams, who was the obvious inspiration for how it all began.

IWSG June 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group posts on the first Wednesday of every month (except Smarch).  That is today!

Truthfully, I nearly packed it in.  I mean, I nearly gave up on posting to this blog.  Not because I stopped considering myself to be a writer (that's not gonna change) but because I had drifted away from the point of blogging about my perspective as a writer.  Part of the reason doesn't even have to do with anything I've done here.  Readers over at Scouring Monk may or not realize (or care) that I stopped posting my Zooropa strips there.  I started receiving feedback that didn't seem to realize what I've been doing with them, so I figured people were just tired of it and didn't feel like just saying so (people rarely are that direct on the Internet; we're a very passive aggressive digital community).  So I just took that ball and went home.  Nearly did that here, too, as a result.  I got a comment from one of the Geek Twins (you can't please them all both) concerning something that really didn't have anything to do with him.  I'm only addressing the situation directly because of another situation from earlier this year, also concerning Scouring Monk rather than this blog.  For a good number of months I participated in the Armchair Squid's Cephalopod Coffeehouse virtual book club.  It's a bloghop exactly like IWSG, but with a new linky list every month.  Now, when I periodically say I don't play well with others (such as this whole post), you will know what I mean (in case you didn't already).  Andrew Leon had been adding somewhat related posts onto those lists (several each month) for all that time.  It's not like I never clicked the links.  Each time I checked they weren't actually about books.  Which is what the Cephalopod Coffeehouse is all about.  So I got fed up with that and made a comment over at his blog.  No big deal.  He just deleted it.  But then Squid made an anonymous comment on his blog about playing nice.  I knew it was about me.  I said so.  He made a vague comment in return about hoping I wouldn't stop participating after I suggested maybe that's what I should do.  But I did stop participating.

Now (here you get a new paragraph), lately Andrew has been submitting actual book talk links to the list.  That's fine.  I hadn't really been thinking about it that way, but I guess the whole reason I reacted the way I did was because it was basically Squid's fault for keeping all of Andrew's bad links in the list to begin with.  I tend to start thinking like this.  I assume Squid was fine with Andrew's antics because they actually know each other in real life.  Maybe they don't.  I can't keep all these relationships straight.  I know Squid knows Mock, and that Andrew to me is better known as part of Pat Dilloway's dedicated circle.  I know that Andrew and Squid and Mock are all teachers.  Anyway, I have a history of not agreeing with Andrew's thought process (although bizarrely we sometimes randomly, completely sync up, such as our positive opinion of Saving Mr. Banks), and so that had a huge role to play in why I ended up making a comment about his Cephalopod Coffeehouse habits (at that time).  When I read a blog and don't agree with their thought process, I don't feel like making a contrary comment after all their posts.  I just stop reading them.  No one on the Internet wants to have conversations.  This is a land of histrionics and disagreements.  (And cats.)  Or unconditional support.  Which I can't do.  (This makes me a bad person in some ways.)

All this dirty laundry...This isn't the way the IWSG/A-to-Z Challenge folks (either those who participate in these things or are associated with those who do and/or have) behave toward one another.  I know this.  I'm a rebel with low readership.  I'm talking about any of this because that's my thought process this month.  This is definitely a problem for a writer working on a blog for readers who spend all their time supporting each other without really giving it a second thought.  I give everything a second thought.  And a third thought.  And so on.  I quit Squid's club, and stopped reading his blog entirely, and by the rules of reciprocity, he gave up completely on me, too.  The only person who doesn't follow these rules is Pat Dilloway.  I still can't explain that.  Perhaps you are aware of my other great blogging faux pas from early in the year: giving Pat the silent treatment for a few months after he gave Pale Moonlight a devastating review.  In fact, that's exactly what the subject was from the most recent incident I mentioned at the start of this.  I know Pat's instincts pretty well at this point.  I knew he wouldn't even come close to liking the book.  And so it was not at all surprising that he didn't.  All this time since, I've been trying to explain why it hasn't affected my creative thought process so much as my blogging experience, why I wonder why I should bother.

I blunder all the time.  I can't be the shiny happy blogger.  If that means I have to spend an entire IWSG post talking about matters that sometimes don't have anything to do with actual writing, then so be it.  Because being a writer in this context also means being a blogger.  And being a blogger has become so much more complicated since people actually started reading my material.  I still don't know how that happened.  I don't remember how I stumbled into Alex Cavanaugh.  But then I did the A-to-Z for the first time, and suddenly I had readers, full of expectations, ones I had never even considered before.  I was writing long before I had readers, but suddenly these readers are coming up with comments that aren't all that relevant to what I'm doing.  I just don't get that.  I get that I don't overlap in my thought process with a lot of other people.  I've dealt with that my whole life.  That, apparently, just is not going to change, even in the expanded pool of people available on the Internet.  I get that people in the IWSG are here to support each other no matter what.  But what I'd really like is someone (anyone) who gets what I'm trying to do.

And so every setback is a cause to make me insecure.  So there's that tie-in with the point of this particular club.  When I spend months trying to explain what Pale Moonlight is, even after the Dilloway review, and still get the comment that I should just forget it, I think that's completely beside the point.  Having this blog is all about my perspective.  If it's not, what's the point?  I'm not here to rationalize why someone didn't like my book.  I guess I'm not even here to convince anyone to read my book.  I've found that just doesn't work.  People read books by bloggers they like, not books they like.  (Most of the time, they end up liking those books anyway.  So you see why that whole thing baffled me.)  I can't say things like this without alienating everyone.  You guys are the definition of support.  But only as long as the rules are adhered to.  The people who define those rules, they have the greatest support around.  Everyone loves them.  They're lovable.  I get that.

I kept this ball on the field, but this is to say that I'm going to play by my rules.  The consequences don't really seem to matter.  Bad reputation?  For what?  For being honest?  For calling a spade a spade?  In the best of all possible worlds, Candide is running around experiencing all kinds of shenanigans, and people like honesty.  I don't know.  It doesn't matter.

Boom.

WRiTE CLUB 2014

I really wasn't go to do it.  Long-time readers may recall my ultimately miserable experience with DL Hammons's WRiTE CLUB two years ago.  I vowed I'd never go back.  But things change.  I figured, why not?

The concept, I think, has been improved.  You can read all about it here, including the streamlined selection process.  There will be a finite number of samples in contention.  One of the things I thought had gotten wildly out of control previously was how bloated the whole thing had become.  Good for Hammons.  Bad for people actually trying to participate in the thing.  Technically, the new format doesn't guarantee every submission will even make it into the contest.  If mine doesn't, that's fine.  I'm actually okay with that.

And I will try and play nice once the contest kicks off next month.  (You have until tomorrow to enter, by the way.)  I know I don't always play well with others.  But knowing your weaknesses is the first step to working around them.  Hopefully.  Even making this step is a distinct improvement over my worse instincts, so there's that.

I may or may not keep you updated on how this actually play out.  We'll see.

On the subject of beta readers

Never ever ever ever ever ever use another writer as a beta reader.

Now, let me clarify: a good writer.  A good writer will only be able to give you two kinds of feedback:

1. It's a work of genius.
2. It needs work.

If your beta reader/good writer is honest, they will not easily bestow "it's a work of genius" on your work.  A good writer will always have good suggestions for "it needs work;" they are the only suggestions worth considering.  (The problem is, if you take advice from a good writer, you're also opening your work to having a co-written status.)  

A good reader will only be able to tell you that it doesn't generally work; in that instance it's still the writer's prerogative as to what, if anything, needs to change.  That's a reader's job.  To have a reaction.  To experience the material.

All of which is to say, that's my opinion of beta readers.  They're an established element of the writer's repertoire.  Look at any book and you're liable to find a lot of thank-yous in an acknowledgements section.  To me, this is always kind of the unnecessary look behind the curtain.  It's nice that/when a writer can depend on a lot of resources to reach the end of their story, but to my mind, writing is still a solitary achievement.  Writing books, anyway.  It's a completely different story, talking about movies or TV shows or music.  That's why there will always be a stark contrast between books and other entertainment mediums.  That and the fact that it's a completely different experience, almost always demanding far more commitment than others.  But that seems to be changing in our current binge culture.  Still, you know what I mean.

I appreciate the concept of sounding boards.  Writers want to know if what they've been spending so much time on is actually working.  The more nervous writers are already questioning themselves.  They can hardly even finish what they're working on.  The most nervous writers (besides the ones who can't manage to put a single word down) are the ones constantly questioning their stories as they're writing them.  Parallel revision.

But if you must depend on beta readers, know what they are.  Understand that you can't just assume you will get the valuable feedback you're expecting.  Asking other writers is like asking for trouble.  If you're a writer who really does need this support, are you asking others writers you know are better than you, or are you asking those who are of a comparable skill set?  If the latter, are you just assuming that you will improve each other in the process?  Or setting yourself up for further mediocrity?

Because that's what I fear.  I fear that writers who depend on beta readers won't really consider what they're risking.  Maybe it's a matter of what I personally expect from writing.  I have no real interest in writing for the sake of writing.  I want to produce something that has the potential to be remembered, for all the right reasons.  I don't just want to slap a few words together entertainingly, slap my name on it, and get a lot of readers.  I want something good.  Not just something passable.

If you end up with a good writer as your beta reader, are you willing to accept their advice?  Because chances are that good writer will not react to your material the same way a good reader will.  Both can forgive a lot, more than you'd expect.  Reading is inherently a marathon.  It's pointless to expect every word to be perfect.  But the story as a whole should be.  No matter how you approach that.  The reader will forgive more than the writer, though.  The reader will be less demanding.  But the writer will force you to a story that will make good readers.  And perhaps even good writers.

IWSG May 2014: The Curse of the Writer/Reader II

The Insecure Writers Support Group meets the first Wednesday of every month (unless it's doomsday, in which case we meet under tiny umbrellas because what the heck else are we going to do?), and...guess what day it is?

No, it is not Blernsday.  (The day we play blernsball, naturally.)

I'm going to talk about the Curse of the Writer/Reader, which is to say writers who also happen to be active readers and the blurring of the thought processes between these two modes.  Are they in fact separate at all?

I just don't know.  It's probably easy to assume, because obviously it's the same brain processing both experiences, but what if the way you write is in fact vastly different from the way you read?  As readers, it's easy (or should be) to tell when you're engaged on a critical level.  You know when something is or isn't working for you.  But is it the same when you're writing?  That's the real trick.  I like to think I do.  I do go back and fix and/or totally rewrite some parts of a manuscript, but often I consider the act of altering a story a betrayal of that story.  If I start changing things too much, the whole integrity of it begins to fall apart.  To a certain extent, once you start writing something, it starts to take over.  To go back and question the decisions you began making is in effect putting yourself back in control.  But is that really what you should be doing?

When I change things in editing, it's usually a beginning or ending, to make it better align with what the story became rather than how I originally envisioned it.  The writer in me trusts my instincts.  But what does the reader think?  When I've gone back and read my own material, years after the fact, I've still been pretty satisfied.  The way my memory works, I wouldn't be able to remember every little detail, where it is or sometimes even what it is, so when I've gotten feedback asking me about certain elements, I have to scratch my head a little.  But, especially when I went back and reread the Monorama collection a few months back (and this is not to try and sell you on the book or toot my own horn) but I really was engaged as a reader.  They say we write what we want to read.  (In the case of poor writing, I hate to think of what those people like to read.)  That's what I try to do.  I take bits of inspiration from the stuff I most enjoy, and mix them with my own thoughts.

There's always the chance I'm completely delusional.  I guess the term "beta reader" has come into fashion, but at any rate it's the idea of having test audiences.  I always kind of questioned that phenomenon.  The feedback from these people really is no different from whatever the writer can expect from any audience.  If you depend on these people, you really have to trust their instincts.  And, I assume, doubt your own.  It's one thing to find out you had a blind spot about something, but at a certain point...you're also asking for co-writers, basically.

One of my favorite anecdotes from college was learning T.S. Eliot completely rewrote "The Waste Land" after receiving feedback from Ezra Pound.  First off, "Waste Land" is an acknowledged work of genius.  But to think that Eliot only arrived at it after Pound's observations opens a whole can of worms.  On the one hand, obviously Eliot always had the poem in him.  On the other, the finished work becomes as much Pound's achievement as Eliot's.  The thing that Eliot wrote was basically something else entirely.  It boggles me, it really does, and has haunted me for more than a decade.

Is that the sort of thing all great works require?  For someone else to chisel it, basically, out of the block, like Michelangelo contemplating his next masterpiece?

There are all sorts of cautionary tales of famous writers who, left to their own devices, deliver bloated would-be great new works (Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch comes to mind).  But there's also someone like Herman Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick to considerable apathy after initial great success with far less accomplished material.  Someone who would winnow the tale of Captain Ahab down to something more conventional would be robbing history of one of literature's great achievements.

So that's what I mean by the Curse.  It's a constant struggle for me, and I think it ought to be one for every writer.  It's another sign I don't trust you as one if you don't have these doubts.  Sometimes I'll start writing a story a couple of times before I feel confident that I've discovered the proper entry.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe writing needs a guiding hand, needs a critic outside of one's own head, because maybe the reader really is different from the writer.

Well, maybe.