Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
Well, folks, by the time you guys see this, I’ll be offline. I expect to see it through to the end, though if there’s an abject emergency– say, someone’s body parts are no longer all present and accounted for– give me a call. I hope nothing like that happens. Anyway, I’ll post on Sunday morning to let you know how it went.
Ciao.
I’ve spoken at some length about Essay Week, without actually giving the skinny on what it is or what its goal is for the May session. I figure now’s a pretty good time to get it taken care of. Those of you who were around for the last EW, back in August, might consider yourselves excused, but I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around; the explanation’s a little different this time.
Well, first, to address the question on everyone’s mind: “What right does this jerk have to write these long, ridiculous diatribes and expect us to care?” Funny thing is, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’m not particularly notable and I don’t really aspire to be; if I do become famous, I’d rather be known as a storyteller than as a commentator or discussion-master. Still, every once in a while I get these urges to try to speak my mind in what’s been called “the new marketplace of ideas”. (I’ll get into this more on Monday, when I talk about Web 2.0 and social networking.)
So, put short, Essay Week is five straight days on the blog about a handful of topics I feel the need to speak to. I come close sometimes outside of the designated Week, but usually scrap those because the topic on my mind at the moment is (nine times out of ten) fanboyism, and I’ve kinda done that one to death. The purpose of the week, when I first did it last year, was to give me some time to work through a game without having to worry about writing for the blog (recall I was working on the nonstop-posting challenge). This time it’s a little bit of an inversion– I’m writing so that I can, in essence, focus on my writing; the draft, specifically, needs some solid attention without interruption, and this coming week is an excellent way to do it. So, by prepping five long posts ahead of time, I can ensure that content stays flowing while at the same time giving myself a break.
Now, if that’s the purpose, why not simply take the week off from the blog? After all, Shutdown Day is coming– why not just stay offline and out of relative contact for the entire week? That’s more than a little impractical in this case. First off, I’m flirting with inertia enough as it stands. Recall my rules of writing– if you stop doing something long enough, eventually you stop doing it altogether. The second reason is that I do pride myself on having “something” up when I say I will. Even the excuses I’ve habitually posted, in my mind, count– it’s not that I don’t want to write for the main page. Sometimes things just come up, or sometimes there’s nothing really I want to say (or what I did say isn’t just bad, it’s whiny and annoying and you really don’t want me to post it, trust me). Finally, I did make a resolution to try to keep up a consistent set of updates, and I intend to keep that promise. (Maybe next year I’ll try daily updates on both sites…. hrm.)
So, now you know what it is, and why I’m doing it. Just to give you all a little taste, the five topics I have in mind– I’ll be writing the essays tonight and tomorrow– are as follows: “On Social Networking”, “On The Tantalizing Fringe”, “On A Lack of Organization”, “On Reinventing Oneself”, and “On Being A Programmer”. I do hope that you enjoy these topics.
One of the things I’d like, really, is to see people start discussing the topics a bit more. I always feel a little self-conscious posting all this crap up, as if I were some sort of twenty-first century Walter Cronkite telling you all The Way It Is. As much as I style myself a Forum Tyrant, I think there’s room to challenge me on a few things.
One way or another, I hope you’ll all join me in at least exploring some of the things I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while.
As you can see to the right (or here if you’re one of those weird RSS people), the Tekkoshocon 2008 report is up. I’m still working through what few photos I do have, and once I get them all into Flickr I’ll post a link to that set, but that might be a while longer. In any event, I hope you like text.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Harvesting Blueberries is in dire need of a complete rewrite. This first draft is disjointed and unpolished, and unfortunately it spews plot threads faster than Lachesis’ berserk sewing machine. Most of those threads are dropped or ignored, and unfortunately the whole thing just winds up being somewhat bad. Not completely bad, and definitely not unsalvageable, but it does need to be re-evaluated from the very first moment. So, that’s the April project… and I’m going to treat it as another NaNo.
You might think that this would be a bad thing, given how much I’m looking forward to Tekkoshocon in the second week of April. But just remember that November had Thanksgiving in the middle, and that worked out okay. Besides, I’m going to give myself a head-start: I’m starting the writing on the last weekend in March, anyway; most likely the 28th.
To this end, I’m spending these two weeks in re-reading the story, identifying the flow of the plot, and actually compositing the plot threads into an overall narrative. (Oh, and gaming every once in a while, too. Can’t let the backlog get too far backed up.) What’s becoming the hardest part, really is making sure that I have an outline that works and that doesn’t get thrown out halfway through. I have the basic flow of the story done– that’s what the first draft was for. Now I have to cut the crap out and add in more of what’s good.
Another part of this is that I’m using a new piece of software, after having tinkered with it for a little bit. StoryMill turned out to be a pretty useful tool in giving me the overall view of the plot that I needed, and so I’m going to try using that for the full rewrite. If nothing else, it should help me with making sure I keep character details consistent– I honestly don’t recall what color Chloe’s hair is anymore. I’m also really digging the Timelines view. It has a bit of a learning curve– but then, what software doesn’t?– but it offers some tools that make working with it not just easier, but a genuine joy. And, as we’ve established with the Reclamation List and the Backlog List, I’m a numbers junkie and can’t seem to work very well without having some concrete measure of progress to show for it. (StoryMill is Mac-only, but I believe Pez had found a Windows program that accomplishes much the same thing– hopefully he will share its name and link with us.)
So, really, there’s three phases that need to be done. The first is to “import” the existing sequence of events into StoryMill so that I can make sure I have the general events together. Then, I need to devise a revised sequence of events and see how that impacts the plot– I already know one major thing that I’m going to change, and one plot thread that’s going to be picked up far earlier than it already is. Finally, I need to sit down and write this second draft, hopefully without requiring too much in the way of re-revising the plot. I expect to be done with Phase One by Easter.
Overall, and this is the harder part, I need to make the story far denser than it already is. Blueberries‘ first draft has huge swaths of text (tens of pages in some cases) where nothing pertinent to the plot happens, and all of the actual plot stuff is off-stage. I would say that it’s being done in the name of characterization, but it’s not– it was just stalling for time and words. Phillip (the protagonist) needs to take a more proactive approach; when I realized this in the original story, his action took the form of a letter. A good start, kinda, but just wasn’t enough. I need to speed him up there, and slow down the actions of another individual so that I’m not constrained that badly.
There are a handful of scenes in the first draft which are brilliant (in my opinion)– they really serve to highlight the characterizations and to give the reader a good sense of who these people are. That’s something I’m particularly proud of: this is the first story I’ve written where the characters feel far more alive than the scenery. More than that, really, they’re quite unconventional; the orphanage runner is a single man not even in his thirties yet, the high-powered executive is a young woman who doesn’t use her gender as a crutch, and the enforcer is a scrawny guy hiding behind sunglasses. Unfortunately, they got to be this in-depth at the expense of the plot’s adherence and coherence. So, there’s that problem solved: now that I know how the characters would react in these situations, I can plan ahead a bit more. One of my favorite parts of the draft actually affected the plot, and it’s perfect enough that it stands a very good chance of making it into this second go-around. It fits how the characters involved would react to the stimulus that prompted it, and it wasn’t forced or contrived. It then led very naturally into how the other characters would react, and so on and so forth. That’s one of the points where the characters seemed to stop resisting my attempts at forcing them into the plot and started flowing with it, started generating plot on their own. Good for the pace of writing and for inspiration; bad for sticking to an outline– I wound up writing by the seat of my pants for the last seventy-odd pages of the book.
So, rather than talk more about it, I figure it’s best to actually just, you know, do it. Ciao, folks.
(Quick Gaming Note: I’m aware of some problems with Xbox Live right now that are preventing the gamercard above from functioning properly. This all stems from a glitch with Soltrio Solitaire not properly giving me credit for an achievement, and it threatens to put me out of the running in the Achievement Race. Gah. More news as it develops.)
So, I might not have mentioned this, but I wrote a novel this year. (You may commence with the throwing of heavy objects to get me to stop bragging… now.) It’s not the first one, really, and that’s what worries me. Harvesting Blueberries is my second novel, but it’s not like I can go around and say “Oh, yeah, I’ve done this before,” because they invariably ask me about the first novel, and my response is usually a mumbled “we don’t talk about the first novel anymore”. So my second big resolution is going to be a stronger commitment to editing and submitting Blueberries for publication.
(side note: I realize, actually, that if I wanted to, I could write an FF8 fan novella remarkably similar to Blueberries… and the title would have to be “Sowing the SeeDs”. Yeah, not gonna happen.)
I only sent about seven query letters for Inconsequential. I really did mean to send more. Honestly. The problem is that that book was just such a weird niche title as to be almost unsellable as a first novel. (Or I could be rationalizing my crappy-ass writing, but I doubt that just enough to keep me out of Aerobic Brooding territory.) I did get some positive feedback from a couple of the rejections, though– particularly from a source I definitely would not have expected (Launchbooks sent me a personalized letter; I did indeed emit the squee of joy). So I figure that I just didn’t get it to the right people.
It’s the damnedest thing, honestly. I wrote Incon because I specifically did not want to write a fantasy story. So what should I find when I started leafing heavily through the 2007 Writer’s Market? “We want fantasy!”. That’s the other thing, though. I gravitate towards fantasy naturally anyway. I suppose Blueberries could be called “magical realism”, except that I certainly don’t get into any huge philosophical debates as Gabriel Garcia Marquez does. It’s not exactly “modern fantasy”, either, as there’s only the lightest of fantasy touches added in (I took great pains to not let the characters rely far too much on their less mundane aspects). Still, the fact that Blueberries is so wide open actually works in its favor, as opposed to how narrowly Incon was defined (”modern literary satire” wasn’t in terribly many agent listings).
So, the goal right now is to get ten letters sent a month, regardless of response times or rejections. I’m going to send letters based on this draft, as well, for January; editing will continue on it as I send out, but this is the biggest stumbling block I’ve had to deal with. Like yesterday, it boils down to laziness, but laziness of a different sort– I, previously, didn’t see the value in the whole endeavor. It’s a matter of risk versus reward, and blowing a couple hundred dollars on paper, toner, stamps and envelopes is a small price to pay to get published. Plus, well, the next one will be easier, or so I hear. And the next one might just be Incon… maybe.
Oh, I want to make 2008 a two-novel year, too. I’m thinking May or June as a writing month, depending on how the gaming goes. I’ve found that this dedication stuff works wonders for me, and putting enough pressure on myself to do it helps out quite a bit. So, I might take late spring or early summer to do up a novel, or more likely, write up some short stories. A 100K word novel is a rough job, but four or five 10K word short stories, with a handful of shorter ones, would probably be enough to spur me into remaining creative the whole year around. And I’ve got a ton of stuff on my scrap pile to look through; what I outlined as the ‘06 NaNo could probably be reworked into a longer-form tale.
Fair enough, I suppose; we’ll see how well this turns out. Tomorrow, let’s have a look at the gaming and anime plans for the new year.
At 5:46p, I completed the first draft of Harvesting Blueberries. The final word count for this draft is 114,037 words according to OpenOffice’s word count tool. (A substantial blog post for the day is still forthcoming… just wanted to get this out.)
This evening, the total word count for Harvesting Blueberries reached 100,600 words. This makes it, officially, the longest single work of fiction I have written to date. In comparison: The sum total of my completed fan fiction (14 stories) is approximately 158K words. The initial draft of Inconsequential, counting author’s notes, is 98.7K words. And the sum total of all of my blog posts between January 1st and November 30th, 2007, not counting comments, is 114K words. The Blueberries draft is still in progress; I expect it to be finished before the end of the week, with a final word count around 110-120K.
Here we are, a week past the end of November, and I’ve yet to have made any real mention of just how the whole NaNoWriMo experience went down. Now, granted, this might be because I spent 90% of November detailing, almost painfully at times, what I was doing with regards to Blueberries. Still, I think it’s important to have come to some conclusions and discovering exactly what I really actually did and what I learned as a result of those mistakes.
( Seven simple rules for writing a novel that might not suck after a few revisions or so. » )
To confess a secret, I’ve only put down about 8000 words since the end of November. But, I’ve progressed enough in that time that the last 16 outline points could still keep me on target for my initial estimate of about 120K. More than that, though, I’ve cleared the big physical action-movie climax of the story, and can now focus on the final emotional climaxes and the ending. I’m going to have to take another couple of days as a writing rush to ensure that it gets finished before the end of the year, but it’s a priority. So, that’s probably going to be Sunday; we’ll see. Catch you folks tomorrow, likely with Bailout.
As noted on the Twitter feed last night, I came up with a title for the current NaNo, here at about the halfway point through the plot. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the name of my next work (until I decide something else works better): Harvesting Blueberries.
The title came about due to blueberries coming up on two separate occasions in the course of conversation within the book, as well as having some relevance to a handful of plot elements (to give the most obvious one, troubled children = “blue berries”, but that’s a superficial connection– there are more, now that I think about it). Also, some interesting facts about true blueberries: they’re native to the northeast United States (the story’s set in Pittsburgh), they’re harvested throughout summer (the story takes place in late August), and the plants resist fire well, regenerating quickly after wild burns (the story centers on the recovery of a handful of abused gifted children in an experimental foster home). There are other species of berry that are indeed blue, which are native to Europe, but a genuine blueberry has white flesh with blue skin, while other species are blue throughout. It might seem a little pretentious to try to assign too much meaning to the title at this point, but it just fits, based on what I’ve written and what I have planned.
Besides, I like blueberries. And the title doesn’t seem to have been used for a fiction book yet anyway. So, hopefully, this will work out.
I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t turn out to be too sappy or overly saccharine; it’s really, REALLY easy to throw easy pitches to the protagonists in a story that centers on child abuse. Someone I spoke to yesterday afternoon remarked that it was unusually dark subject matter for me, and to be completely honest, it really is. I’d just finished the description of the extent of the abuse on the primary victim, and it made me uncomfortable even writing about it. That’s a fascinating thing about being a writer; I can see such a horrifying thing in my mind, and I know that I have to work through my revulsion and document it as clinically as a coroner and as poetically as a reporter. Knowing that that’s what I have to do doesn’t make it any easier, mind you, but it does give me the resolve I need to actually do it.
And it also inspires me to beat the f#%$ out of anyone who would dare raise a hand in true anger against a child. Which can’t be a bad thing, really.
Aaaaaanyway. That’s that, really. Catch you gys tomorrow.
This evening, Blessings and Curses (working title) reached the 50K mark for its first draft. I estimate that I am about 33% of the way through the outlined story at this point, but that percentage is misleading because plot elements which were not in the outline are starting to come together to both truncate and extend the remaining ‘time’. This is the fastest that I have ever completed a NaNoWriMo challenge, and only the second time that I have completed the 50K challenge. It is also only the third original story idea that I have taken past 50,000 words. More updates as events warrant; I’m officially shifting focus to this project as my ‘next book’ and putting the revision of Inconsequential on the back-burner for now.
Oh, don’t think for a second that I’m going to take a break now. Today might be a slow day in terms of writing, but that’s just because I’m a little burned out on words after the 22,000 word weekend I just had. I’m just resting tonight, maybe… I have so many ideas on where the story could go next and stay within the bounds of the ‘plot’, but I’m just too whacked to think any of them through right now. Catch you tomorrow.
